Quixotic Quisling

Do you care about Wales? Can you code? Fancy helping TheyWorkForYou then?

3 July 2009 – 3:06 am

Below is some full background to this, but in summary TheyWorkForYou are looking for volunteer coders interested in working on Welsh Assembly data. If that’s you, please join the new discussion list and let’s figure out how to do it.

If you don’t know TheyWorkForYou then take some time to familiarise yourself. It’s a well established site taking parliamentary data and presenting it in a queryable form. It’s free, loaded with information and very useful indeed.

The whole thing is maintained by mySociety who are world class at this sort of thing.

Have a play and see what you can glean about your MP or issue of choice. The search function allows you to subscribe by email (or better still, RSS feed) to notify you immediately whenever something you care about is discussed.

This is all very well for the UK parliament but the Wales section of TheyWorkForYou is currently looking very bare, containing only the following text.

We need you!
It’d be fantastic if TheyWorkForYou also covered the Welsh Assembly, as we do with the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Scottish Parliament, but we don’t currently have the time or resources ourselves — in fact, both those assemblies were mainly done by volunteers.

If you’re interested in volunteering to help out, please get in touch!

So yes, Wales is the only constituent part of the UK which doesn’t have its parliamentary data available on TheyWorkForYou.

There is nothing preventing us, it’s purely because nobody’s stepped up and done it.

As a quick explanation of the work that needs to be done: Welsh Assembly proceedings and transcripts are already available on the web from the official site. But they’re effectively raw dumps - of speeches and other data. It’s almost impossible to get useful insights about members’ voting records. It provides no option to subscribe to notifications that a phrase was used. Apart from a very basic and clunky site search function, all the insights are locked in. You could do a human-powered research trawl through the records, but that starts to get a bit unwieldy for normal people. It feels like the preserve of experts and not really like proper democracy.

Most of TheyWorkForYou’s engine is already built. In the words of Matthew Somerville at mySociety, the work now is to “parse the official report of the Assembly into structured machine-readable data to feed into TheyWorkForYou, along with member information for the Assembly. This will need programming skills, I’m afraid.”

So if you know anything about data structures or programming, why not apply that knowledge for the good of everyone? Join the discussion list for now as we’ll be figuring out how to tackle it.

Any given Assembly Member who does his or her job properly would surely encourage the kind of scrutiny that TheyWorkForYou could bring. You might be wondering why nobody at the Welsh Assembly has added the necessary features to allow their data to be queried. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt this time. Maybe they don’t always intend to obfuscate and hide this stuff. It’s just they’re not up to speed with any better ways of doing it. You might be able to help them! And the people of Wales!

I’m not naive enough to think that all problems can immediately be solved by opening up this information. Neither will it be enough to get every voter running to the polls once the information is available. All manner of things can go wrong in the democratic process. But if your thing is data, there is a clear problem there and maybe that’s the part of the scene you can help with.

In Wales we have a good selection of knowledgable, principled and often witty political bloggers. I’m not one. But I can help resource the conversation in the party political domain by opening up the possibility of insights from the data. It will be a step towards better accountability among our representatives. Let’s hope it does clear a pathway to some possible solutions.

If you’re not a coder, you could make a donation to mySociety or spread the word.

By Carl Morris | Posted in charity, politics, technology, web | Tagged coding, democracy, programming, theyworkforyou, wales | Comments (2)

Reaching for a better email tomorrow (my white inbox resolution six months in)

1 July 2009 – 11:48 pm

Happy new half-year!

Back in January I made a resolution to leave my inbox empty every night. I have partially succeeded. It’s forcing me to make those little decisions. It’s a lot more manageable. Hooray!

At times I’ve let it slip. But there’s no use feeling any guilt over it. Guilt won’t motivate me, it won’t fix anything and it’s never the right response to ANYTHING. It’s probably better to feel total, utter freedom. FREEDOM. Try it.

The overall point is I CARE about my work and the promises I make. The act of giving out an email address carries responsibilities. If the inbox were to flood to a river of unanswered messages, bacn and spam, it would be time to rethink my involvement. Merlin Mann wrote a good piece about the high cost of pretending. It’s well worth a read. For instance, if you’re going on holiday why make a weak promise about your email backlog if you just can’t keep it?

I also like Donald Knuth’s stance on email (total abstention so he can have the time to write huge books about algorithms).

I am continuing with email but those guys have taught me it should be a deliberate decision, not a default. Most of it is up to me because on a positive note, I am totally at one with my Thunderbird email software. I have customised every square millimetre to my little foibles. (We all have little foibles.) It runs locally so there is a minimum lag between my commands and its obedience. It will always be quicker than Gmail’s web interface, for instance. Thunderbird engenders super slick sensations of being highly-effective which I then transmute into reality.

By contrast, I dislike these pseudo-email systems that are creeping in. By that I mean direct messaging on any social site which is a bit like email but doesn’t let you DO STUFF to it. Facebook messages are pretty awful. The interface is clunky. I need to archive things out of sight and it’s not possible. I’m left with a river of everything. I think it probably reinforces bad habits for people. Don’t even mention auto-filtering, that’s nowhere. As for the volume of messages, if you don’t respond to an event you’ll get every single mass broadcast related to that event.

I can’t turn off Facebook direct messages but I do want people to be able to contact me. So next to my face I’ve written “If you are thinking of sending me a private message, I will respond far more quickly to proper email. Just saying.”. Let’s hope it doesn’t sound too arsey. I just want my every action to be gilded with quality feelings for all involved.

Twitter direct messages are OK I guess. You can’t DO STUFF with them. (Scoble listed the stuff.) But at least they’re 140 characters long or less - you can express anything with that! Well, nearly.

Anything more interactive deserves a wiki or a Google Doc. (Or a Wave but that isn’t available yet.)

Or a good old phone chat.

Maybe even a face-to-face meet-up.

By Carl Morris | Posted in business, milestones, technology, web | Tagged bacn, communication, donaldknuth, email, gtd, merlinmann, productivity, thunderbird, twitter, work | Comments (0)

Open Season - selections on a theme of openness

23 June 2009 – 1:17 am

I’m thinking about our obsession with “open”.

People work in “open plan” offices. If not then maybe their manager has an “open door policy” and offers an “open mind”. Maybe they conduct negotiations with “open palm”.

Then there’s open source software, now pretty familiar and widely used. Of which OpenOffice is an example (as well as Firefox). And there are examples of “open source” hardware and machines too. Check out Arduino.

Online we use web services that offer OpenSocial, as well as OpenID login. And OAuth - where the open is baked right in.

We’re familiar with Open University of course. They were well ahead of the current trend. Elsewhere, “open society” and “open government” are discussed. In the UK we have Open Rights Group, our counterpart to the EFF.

“Open” is becoming a byword for positive and good and progressive. “Open” is a hot word of now. Will it always be this way? Or will it be remembered as a passing enthusiasm - either superseded or perhaps absorbed everywhere to the extent that it becomes transparent?

I’m particularly interested in open source. I’ve benefitted a huge amount from open source software. Some great work has been done and some very successful companies of many kinds exist - all thanks to open source software.

How far can this approach be extended to non-software projects?

Creative Commons and approaches to copyright reform represent a form of openness, outside of software. Some (but not all) Creative Commons licences allow derivative works and adaptation.

Can you run a country using open source principles? (What’s going to happen when Tim Berners-Lee opens up government data in his new role? Will he enable us to spot and fix the bugs in Brown’s Britain?)

What about human relations? What about sharing? (And “over-sharing”?)

What about “proprietary” - the opposite of open, at least in a software context? At times, proprietary can be pretty good if you’re the proprietor. But you also miss opportunities.

I figured the best way to explore these questions would be to start documenting bits and snippets I find along the way. For this purpose I’ve started another blog called Open Season. I’ve just realised the term comes from hunting, that wasn’t deliberate. But it does capture some of the ambiguity of open. If you’re in the firing line, you’d prefer closed season. Open letters are similar - you don’t always want to receive them, especially if you’re a politician with responsibilities being identified.

Initially Open Season will resemble a scrapbook with the odd comment from me. I’ve chosen Tumblr as it’s ultra-quick blogging for anthologists and snippers and plagiarists. With the Firefox plugin, I can drag items to the bottom-right corner of my browser and they’re on. Then in the longterm I can turn them into properly thought-out posts here. Open Season is a pile of bits. Even more of a pile of bits I mean.

My aim is not to explore the benefits of open source in software. Those are pretty well documented and discussed. I’m looking at that, but I’m trying to grasp the wider issues of the open philosophy.

Usually computer software runs as object code - which is compiled from source code.

But any other creative work doesn’t have source code. This blog post doesn’t have source code. A car doesn’t have source code. A government doesn’t have source code. Your brain doesn’t have source code. Your body doesn’t have source code. (Don’t tell me DNA is source code! It isn’t.)

Any reference to “open source” outside of software is an analogy. Remember when we had to re-adapt everyday terms to describe what happened in and around computers? We would boot and store files, then at the advent of the graphical user interface came the window, paint, wallpaper, menu and the like. Now it’s the other way round - open source works for software, now we’re applying the term to other things.

All this has the potential for awesome results. But taking a software engineering methodology - that can clearly work - and thinking it could be applied to ANYTHING is possibly a bit rash. Let’s see.

Comment if you like. I’m “open sourcing” my thought processes on this one. Can’t get away from it.

By Carl Morris | Posted in language, politics, technology | Tagged open, openness, opensource | Comments (2)

English words which look like their meaning

29 May 2009 – 12:54 am

So when I was learning to write English, back in the eighties, I used to mix up the symbols b and d. It’s an easy mistake to make - they’re mirror images and I had 24 other squiggles to learn.

Somebody (pretty sure it was my sister or possibly a teacher) helpfully pointed out that the word bed looks like a bed. This was a useful mental reference at the time and remained a curiosity, after the letter confusion ceased to be a problem. Since those early struggles, I have become a happy user of the handwritten English language and have been known to use it on shopping lists, correspondence and tax forms. Yay!

The word bed definitely looks like a classic bed - it has vertical posts at either side and the letter e is the centre.

Much later on I discovered the musician eYe. If you’re a fan of experimental noise music, you’ll know him as a member of cult Japanese band Boredoms. The cool thing about the word eYe is it looks like a pair of eyes with the capital letter Y representing the bridge of the nose. (Cheers to Paul for bringing it to my attention.)

I don’t know if the resemblence between eYe and a pair of eyes is deliberate. But we do know that Boredoms are not your average band, musically and when it comes to novel ideas.

The members of Boredoms are well accustomed to words which resemble their meaning. Japanese has a pictorial writing system called kanji. It also has two writing systems which are not pictorial, but kanji is our favourite today.

Examples of other writing systems which are pictorial:
Chinese
Egyptian hieroglyphics
road signs
washing symbols on garment labels
symbolic buttons on media players.

I tried to think of other examples of this, the bed phenomenon. Here are the next ones I thought of.

poo

If the person speaking is a human rather than an animal, machine or deity then I is totally valid. It looks like a human standing up. I prefer a lower-case i because it has a little bobbly head. But you can’t write that in polite company because for some reason I’ve never understood, the personal pronoun must be upper-case. Unlike “me” which can be all lower-case. Where’s e e cummings when you need him?

CD stands for compact disc. But it also stands for a circular shiny thing in our new quest for pictorial English. Obviously the font we choose will have some effect on its resemblence to a physical CD. Can we handle the vertical line down the middle of our CD word? It could be the multi-colour rainbow shiny reflective line. Or it could be part of the “onbody” design as it’s known. I know the letter combination CD isn’t a word but it often behaves like one. It’s on the list.

Poo might cause a problem. It’s valid when it looks like three blobs, the first of which has a streaky line running off it. But not all poos look like that, as any reader of reasonable bathroom experience will know. Let’s add it to our provisional list anyway. Not all beds look like the classic bed, so no use being too strict.

By now I was having some mild fun with this. Which other English words look like their meaning? At first I assumed there would be other people demanding immediate answers to this vital question, as I was. I ran a few Google searches involving “bed”, “words which look like their meaning” and other variations. Not much relevant came up but the original fact about bed. It’s very difficult to do a web search for something if you don’t know what to call it.

Most words in English don’t look like their meaning but there are a few that do. I compiled some lists when I originally starting thinking of this.

As I said earlier, there might be some prior research in this area, but I’m not aware of it. And since I like thinking of names for things, often just for my own use, I gave this subset of English a name. If you combine English and a hieroglyph, surely you get Engglyph.

English + glyph = Engglyph

The word is unique in as much as currently there are zero results for the word Engglyph on Google. It looks foreign, which is nice.

Unfortunately the word Engglyph is not a valid Engglyph word itself. Unlike English, which is! Does English look like its meaning? I think it does. In a linguistic sense, what could be more English than the word English? So English is Engglyph.

I poo English CD. At the moment Engglyph vocabulary is looking a bit limited. But it’s not intended as a useful, complete language.

Here are some more. These are all Engglyph, without a doubt.

Four

sixish

eightish

Four has some letters of unequal shape which nonetheless are four in number. The word four in all lower-case looks different but is equally valid.

It’s a similar thing for the words above with the suffix “ish” - which has to include the precise number too. For example, if I offered you sixish apples then it could actually be six apples. Take it up with a Greek philosopher if you don’t like it. Where’s Plato when you need him?

The following are kind of smug faced ones.

word

noun

letters

These three all relate to written language. I don’t want to dwell on them because this is already getting too meta. We ain’t here for no recursive brainache, we want the pleasing elegance of Engglyph.

All Engglyph words must be nouns.

They have to physically resemble the thing. They can’t be adjectives because adjectives are merely properties of nouns. If you’re interested in words which describe themselves, look up autological words.

That’s a different exercise to Engglyph. Although still a worthwhile and rewarding pursuit. :-)

Incidentally there are some words which are both Engglyph and autological such as word.

But let’s get back to more examples:

LINES

BOOBs

sA W

look

eels

zig zag

jUg

I am starting to cheat with some of these, by allowing dangly extra bits and streaky lines.

So zig zag has got some zig zags in the zs - but it also has a bunch of extra letters. BOOBs has three pairs of boobs. Just saying. It also has a letter s which disrupts it somewhat. I should say that look is the noun not the verb, as in “a startled look”. The letter o is an eye and the l and k are like sides of a head.

Two household things with handles are the sA W and the jUg. The handles are sA and the g respectively. The j is the spout. After some cheating with capitalisation and spacing, they just about make the list.

There may be Engglyph-style words for other non-pictorial languages (such as your French, Somali, Malay, Welsh or your German). I may get back to you on that.

By Carl Morris | Posted in language, pastimes | Tagged bed, engglyph, english, japanese, language, meaning, noun, pictorial, writing | Comments (13)

Phorm’s deep blog inspection

20 May 2009 – 9:02 pm

If you’re interested in online privacy issues, you may have read about Phorm, the company that gets your web usage data from ISPs in order to show you contextual advertising.

Recently I’ve been contributing to a blog called Future Music Lab along with some colleagues from the music, media and online industries. One of my posts was an intro to Phorm as I understood it.

I then received an email from Benjamin Usher of the Phorm Communications Team, essentially correcting me on three points I’d made.

It’s interesting that they seem to be monitoring blog posts so closely. I’m not known as a privacy champion or anything, but clearly they felt the need to salvage some reputation by putting me straight. The email looks very “boilerplate” with what look like well-rehearsed rebuttals - so I don’t know if these are old arguments. I still have concerns about Phorm though and the email didn’t reassure me enough to welcome them.

You can comment directly here, on Future Music Lab, or on your own blog.

Make sure you republish anything that you get via email. Let’s have some open scrutiny.

By Carl Morris | Posted in business, privacy, technology | Tagged advertising, ISP, law, phorm, privacy, security, timbernerslee | Comments (3)

In which the monoglot looks at the bilingual baby

16 May 2009 – 5:28 am

Contrary to some inspirational self-help guff out there, there is a time when one should quit. But like Edison and his lightbulb and Moses in the wilderness, this ain’t it. Despite the clear lack of any other similarity between me and those guys, this post is about that. Today’s blog post is about carrying on.

People often ask me “how’s the Welsh going?” and it’s good that they ask. When I started learning in 2007 I decided to fully commit. Part of that decision meant telling anyone who might care. I wanted to signal to Welsh speakers that I welcome them to try addressing me in Welsh and expect to get something back. I also ended up enlisting the indirect support and pester power of my friends, family, peers and colleagues at large, to progress this thing.

So I told people. I was interviewed by a newspaper about my (then) work at My Kung Fu, so I mentioned the Welsh and they printed it. I told more people. I even wore the badge.

It turned out to be a good tactic. Enlist the crowd to hold you to a decision. You will limit your options to just two - to carry on with the project or to quit. And the quitting would be of the most public and humiliating kind. So it gets you through.

So how is the Welsh going?

Kindly permit me a tenuous analogy about the world of open source software releases. If my ability in Welsh were an operating system, right now you could say it was almost at the alpha stage. It’s messy, it’s buggy and the user interface is far from sorted. You will encounter crashes and blank stares if you give me unexpected inputs. Nevertheless the will to progress and develop the product is there and experienced people can test it (by speaking to me in Welsh). You can even expect some useful and worthwhile output as long as you have a bit of patience. If it all goes wrong you can boot to a different partition and use another operating system (English) which has been fully installed and tested.

Much as I like a tenuous analogy, the software one is weak because we’re not here just to function. To be sure, Welsh to me is a useful language: a language of business where you can get things done. But it’s also a language of self-expression. I want to express myself in it and I want to understand other people more fully when they express themselves. Whatever the language, in this world we understand each other merely approximately. Therefore I can try to reduce the distance of that approximation.

Ample research has suggested links between acquiring a second language and various kinds of wellbeing or something like that. If you want to read about that, you can probably find a study. However true any of it might be, it’s not enough of a strategy or day-to-day motivator to keep going - not for me anyway.

I’ve mostly been trying to stop trying to be clever and just think like a BABY. When I started the wlpan course in late 2007, I figured I was a grown-up in English and a baby in Welsh. This amused me but it was totally wrong of course. I’m a grown-up in everything. Not long after starting the course I was attempting to describe the weather and my day job, which are things babies rarely do.

I don’t envy much about the lifestyle or appreciations of your average baby. (He has no equivalent of beer - nor jazz.) But the way a baby learns a language is superb, just mapping words directly on to things. The language becomes set and the mapping of words to things never fails, except for the possibility that he becomes a structuralist philosopher later in life.

Thing - word, word - thing.

Peth - gair, gair - peth.

It’s babies who are exposed to yr iaith Gymraeg who I envy the most. Not only do they acquire Welsh without hardly caring, they also learn English and map both languages separately and directly on to thing-space. The fact I know, say, the word “investment” and its Welsh equivalent (”buddsoddiad”) while they probably don’t is not really any consolation.

Each time I learn some Welsh, I map it on to the English equivalent, which then maps on to the thing or concept or meaning. English is the middleman which is clumsy at best, but try doing it any other way. And the whole thing falls apart regularly for prepositions (”to”, “on”, “over”, “for” and the like) and which verbs they relate to. And also for things like verbs and possessives (dw i’n dy garu di and all that weirdness), I still struggle with that.

Different languages will not map directly on to each other. This is a truism about languages which also happens to be true. Welsh doesn’t map to English. The phrasebook can only be an aid. It’s mental scaffolding.

“Hwyl” does not mean “fun” or “good times” or “mood” or “fervour”, those are just rough guesses. “Hwyl” means “hwyl”. The only way to understand “hwyl” is to go out and experience some genuine hwyl. Preferably in Caernarfon, I might add, with an assortment of local characters. And so it goes for every other word and utterance.

In Welsh you don’t really say you own an object. You don’t say “I’ve got money”. In place of that, as a southerner, you might say “Mae arian gyda fi” which roughly translates as “There is money with me”. So ownership has a different perspective embodied in the expression. It could be a healthier and less greed-prone concept of relating to stuff. That’s a maybe. Anyway, it’s different. A truer understanding of the insights within will only come if one lives in the world of “Mae arian gyda fi” for a while. These are just examples and it’s enough to make a point.

The other method of language learning is to get magically zapped in the forehead. The downside to this method is it doesn’t happen. But even if it did you might miss the life bits.

The product is the process. So even if I can’t think like a baby anymore, I shall continue to walk like one.

By Carl Morris | Posted in language, wales | Tagged babies, baby, Caernarfon, cymraeg, mapping, pellach, welsh, wlpan, words | Comments (7)

Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”, 63 years on

3 May 2009 – 8:10 pm

Language is important.

Recently I found George Orwell’s seminal essay Politics and the English Language online, originally written in 1946. I’d heard of it before but never thought to track it down.

Here’s some of the intro:

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.

If you’ve ever enjoyed the Birtspeak section in Private Eye or wondered about just what our authorities and our local and national government(s) are really saying and not saying, do read the whole thing. Orwell does an excellent job of dismantling the slippery, cliched communications of our time, without the benefit of actually being alive right now. This is a real issue with real consequences and not just for pedants.

We had the perfect example last month. One way to judge UK chancellor Alistair Darling’s recent Budget would be to calculate its impact on your personal finances. (Disclosure: Darling has indirectly gifted me an approximate saving of £71.61 next year according to the BBC’s budget calculator.)

But another way to judge the imaginativeness, the clarity and the originality of the ideas would be to look at the language Darling used. Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times has examined the Budget speech and calculated a sharp increase in the use of cliched jargon words:

“Stakeholders”, “overarching”, “benchmarking” and “strategic” – all words recently banned by local authorities – were more in evidence this year than last.

It goes on. (In that sometimes annoying and self-defeating habit of newspapers, the entire column is produced verbatim on one web page without guidance - you have to skip past the first section to see it.)

As far as the English language is concerned, I’m always divided about the well meaning work of, say, the Plain English Campaign. Sometimes, more complex ideas do take more specialised words and longer sentences to describe. And often what I read of their earnest work strikes me as a bit precious or reductionist. For instance, from their site:

1. High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process.

2. Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.

Does the admittedly clumsy sentence 1 retain any of the full meaning it might have been intended to have when re-expressed as sentence 2, I wonder?

By Carl Morris | Posted in finance, language, politics, uk | Tagged alistair darling, budget, english, finance, financial, financial times, language, politics | Comments (2)

(This Title Is No Longer Available Due To A Trademark Claim By Hasbro, Inc.)

16 April 2009 – 1:08 am

You should have seen the Scrabble board tonight. It was violence, pure violence. Sheer lexical brutality. Above this paragraph could be a photo to illustrate my glorious victory - either a snapshot of tonight’s board or something from Flickr maybe, with a classic edition of the board in all its distinctive colours. But I refuse to kowtow to your relentless lust for the visual. You’ll have to content yourself with imagining it.

I’m by no means a veteran Scrabble player. I just got caught up in the whole Scrabble thing - as an indirect result of the buzz around the Facebook app I guess. (On that note, the title of this blog post is a shout-out to those heady days of 2008.) I don’t think I ever played the Facebook app. It holds no interest for me. Call it a personal foible but for me Scrabble is an unmediated pursuit, very much like poker. It’s physical, it’s haptic and other synonyms. Scrabble involves tiles, racks, the board, a pen and paper. The match is completed in one sitting. Online play would be a completely different game. It would be a sprawling mess, allowing for ridiculous amounts of cheating. Also, it might be there all the time, distracting me from more important things I’m aiming to do, like work. (Or writing this, natch.)

So I’ve been playing the real Scrabble for a while. It’s reasonable to say I’ve been getting gradually better through practice. Most of what I’ve picked up is from playing and losing and learning. I know what to do with an “S” and I’m not about to leave some megapoints open just on a whim. “ZA” is allowed and is short for pizza. Yeah, I know! But it is. You can’t quibble with SOWPODS, the official dictionary. You’re not allowed to play “ZEN” for some reason. On a related theme perhaps, “QI” is allowed and is another way of spelling “chi”, the Chinese concept of a vital life energy.

The margin of 16 points was clear enough tonight. In any field of combat this would be a cause for celebration and reams of bunting. What’s more, I felt for the first time that I was making some kind of breakthrough - not only with Scrabble, but with finding any kind of game to call my own. Quizzes I can do, but otherwise in my life until now I could never claim any notable sporting ability. It’s just not my thing.

In physical sports, for instance, there’s a pattern. Generally I achieve mediocrity and then enter a negative spiral and very quickly settle into a relaxed state of very little ability or, for that matter, concern. I’m happy this way.

Imagine being some kind of sporting jock who took it really seriously! That’s not my style, dude. Tennis would be the worst. Charging up and down, earnestly trying to strike a ball like some pathetic trained animal. Then working up a red-faced fit of pique at the umpire’s decision. What folly. I tried playing tennis once, then immediately felt constrained and wanted to exit the game as soon as possible.

Most of the football matches I played were in school. I wouldn’t have minded being better at football. And I felt bad for the guy who got picked last for the team every time. I would be around fourth or fifth from last. So not really exceptional in my lack of sporting talent either.

Fact remains, if I have a “competitive streak” it has rarely ever surfaced in these kinds of pursuits.

And we’re back at the board of brutality. Recently every Scrabble match I have played has offered a real opportunity of victory. Therefore the victory is the focus and it must not be compromised. In Scrabble, as in life, I’m the kind of guy who cannot abide cheating. In my presence there will be no illegal words, prior dictionary research nor any deviation from the proper rules whatsoever. Last summer I ended up having a debate with somebody who was trying to play “IQ”. (As if that could ever be considered a word!) OK, it wasn’t a debate, it was more like an argument. Call it the unfamiliar feeling of actually being competitive and caring about winning a zero-sum game. I didn’t like that feeling.

Tonight I had a kind of flash-forward, which is like your flashback as a standard movie device except into the future. If I were to work at this Scrabble brilliance then I would have to become the best in the Riverside district of Cardiff. And then zoom out from there. Talent, fame, wealth and comprehensive knowledge of peculiar words awaited. Mostly the latter.

The vision became one of supreme Scrabble ability but I could already clearly see where it was leading. The pinnacle of vocabular skill promised so much. But when I was to conquer it, I would feel empty inside. True, I’d emerged victorious in my future imagining: a real Scrabble overlord. Nevertheless, I felt my qi ebbing away.

In order to progress to this final stage and excel at Scrabble, I would have to proceed to the next stage. The next stage is to play more and better people. The training pathways are pretty much set and gradual improvement is almost inevitable, if you have a knack for it. You get some practice with superior players and spend time equipping yourself with heavier and more effective precision armoury, word patterns and the like. The shortest words are a good place to start.

Lists of the two and three-letter words are easy to find. Now and again I’ve tried. But every time I glance at such a list, I immediately question myself. What am I doing? What has my life become? The exercise seems so futile and I cast aside the papers in disgust. (More often than that I close the web browser window in disgust, but that would be to diminish the dramatic effect of this story.)

I know a guy who hates Scrabble. Let’s call him Matthew, because that is his name. He’s an intelligent guy and you could imagine him being quite good. But Matthew hates Scrabble, his body rejects it, because the words don’t mean anything. They’re just collections of letters that correspond to valid English words. It’s therefore a pointless pursuit in his mind. I don’t hold that point of view but I’m beginning to understand it. Especially when considering all this properly. What kind of person learns those words and pursues that kind of excellence? Sure, you could spend extra time learning the actual meanings of the words, but that’s peripheral to the goal of Scrabble prowess. The meaning is not intrinsic to the game. Did you know that there are, say, Asian people who can play the English version of Scrabble to international standard but who cannot understand English with any degree of fluency? I don’t know if that’s true or not but someone told me once and it could be true.

The learning of words is an arms race in which there can only be one winner. That winner could be me. It could! But it could just as easily be someone else. In order for it to be me, I’d have to really desire it and put time and energy into it. In that activity there is no incentive for me. I have this in its right context now. In any given Scrabble match I certainly wouldn’t mind beating you. But I no longer feel the need to beat you. And I don’t care if you beat me.

Incidentally, I also own a brand new Scrabble Yn Gymraeg set. It’s the official Welsh version with a different set of letters. As far as my Scrabble Yn Gymraeg is concerned, I am hopelessly impaired and stand a very good chance of losing utterly. And that retains a lot of appeal.

By Carl Morris | Posted in language, milestones, pastimes | Tagged competition, cymraeg, english, facebook, games, letters, losing, qi, Scrabble, sport, welsh, winning, words, za, zen | Comments (3)

Why do we have Anti-Terrorist Hotline in Cardiff? (More poster madness.)

1 April 2009 – 1:30 am

These chemicals won't be used in a bomb because a neighbour reported the dumped containers.

Just a couple of days ago, I mentioned some really odd police posters I’d seen in Cardiff. This isn’t about those posters. (At least those police ones were trying to make some kind of valid point, but failed.)

It’s about the ones that say “These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb because a neighbour reported the dumped containers” and the like. I’ve only seen one so far, on Clare Road in Cardiff just now. When I say poster, it’s actually a huge billboard.

Cory Doctorow already did a pretty fine job of covering the lunacy and “socially corrosive” effect of these posters in London. So I won’t rehash what he said.

I’m mainly here to point out the amplified ridiculousness of having this poster displayed in Cardiff, Wales - where we have no living memory of bomb planting nor acts of terrorism. (Correct me if I’m in any way wrong on that. Sheesh.)

Is this a threat now? Do they know something we don’t? The answer to both those questions is “no”. If London doesn’t need this, we in Cardiff really don’t need this. Clare Road is a main road running through Grangetown - which enjoys fairly decent levels of respect and integration between different people, thanks very much.

I can think of several things more appropriate and meaningful to do in the locality than reporting my neighbour because they might appear to have weird hobbies. Here’s the spot on Google Street View. You might prefer to remember it as the location where the band Super Furry Animals did a couple of photoshoots.

The remixes of the posters are well worth a look - a great antidote to the fear mongering.

By Carl Morris | Posted in britain, england, places, politics, uk, wales | Tagged anti-terrorist hotline, caerdydd, cardiff, cory doctorow, cymru, fear, grangetown, liberty, posters, terror, wales | Comments (19)

Six Decades of the 7″ Record

31 March 2009 – 12:00 am

The 7″ record is 60 years old today!

Several have been manufactured since then. I have quite a few.

It is a wonderful format, bigger than a CD and rounder and blacker than a digital audio file.

Actually the very first one was not black, but green.

Thanks to Disgraceland for bringing this anniversary to my attention.

By Carl Morris | Posted in milestones, music | Tagged 45rpm, 7", music, record, vinyl | Comments (0)