ChristopherWhite.info

I handed in my notice at work the other day. I’ve only been at Campaign for seven weeks.

Understandably, they weren’t best pleased.

“I don’t think you’ve behaved very well,” my editor said, and perhaps she has a point¹.Certainly were I in her position I’d hit the fucking roof. And yet at the same time, if I were ever in a situation where an employee showed up one day and told me they’d turned down a job paying over 50% more than their current salary (and particularly one that’s within their area of interest/expertise²), I’d be half-tempted to fire them for being a gibbering idiot.

But a thought occurred last night: for all the talk in some circles about nasty businesses exploiting their workers, employees leaving, at some point, for something better or better-paid is actually expected. The equivalent from the company – firing an employee simply to replace them with someone better/cheaper/faster – is at the very least frowned upon and probably constitutes unfair dismissal³.

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1 Mind you, she doesn’t know this was the second interview I’d had since starting at Campaign -– both for jobs I’d applied for before applying for this one, however. The first was for a science writing job on The ENDS Report for which I’d had to return the writing test by the day I started at Campaign. At the time (as I was re-leaving home) my dad also seemed to frown upon my willingness to change jobs so readily, but he’d begun work in an age where reciprocal loyalty between employee and employer was a given –- ironic since most of the industry in town, which will soon come to include his employers, has pissed off abroad.
2 As the assistant editor of Interactions, the Institute of Physics’s newspaper.
3 Though not after seven weeks, obviously

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“It’s a common misconception, held by all truly stupid people.” - Kryten to the Cat, Red Dwarf series five. (I was, coincidentally, watching this today.)
I imagine many misconceptions are pretty common. Try this one:

Reporting on a case of parthenogenesis (or “self-fertilisation”) in a Komodo dragon, National Geographic have taken the opportunity for a nice, Christmassy “virgin birth” story. They’ve quoted Chester Zoo’s curator of lower vertebrates, Kevin Buley, as saying:

“Essentially what we have here is an immaculate conception.”

Which I guess in one sense is true, but only in as far as all animal conceptions are “immaculate”.

Immaculate conception doesn’t refer to the alleged virgin birth of the alleged son of god, but to the theory that at the time of Mary’s conception god allegedly intervened to keep her soul free from the stain of original sin, as a sinless life was necessary for her to bear Jesus.[1]

Who’s more foolish - the fool that said it, or the fool that printed it?

Ok, it’s not that important a distinction in the grand scam of things, particularly given what an absolute crock the whole story is anyway. But even I know this particular piece of Roman Catholic dogma, and probably the only person more anti-religion than me is flatmate Andy, who actually requested excommunication.

Those readers that know me[2] will be used to my misanthropy, but the general level of popular ignorance is beginning to frustrate me immensely (and I recognise that this is just intellectual snobbery, but there you go…). Having become mostly bored [3] of arguing on Comment Is Free, I’ve been sending the odd letter to The Northern Echo.

Some of the paper’s readers write in with “facts” so wildly inaccurate they’d make even Polly Toynbee blush, so I occasionally put my incredibly large knowledge base[4] to use disabusing them (for which read: pedantically pointing out mistakes[5]).

Unfortunately, the Echo’s features editor keeps cutting out comments such as “…as you would know had you availed yourself of the facts before commenting” and “…as the correspondent would be aware had they ever bothered to look it up”.[6]

Fair enough. It’s their paper and they can do what they like, and such remarks are perhaps gratuitous. But it’s a shame, because I firmly believe most of the world’s problems could be solved if people just bothered to sit down and actually read a book once in a while. Or at least we could have an intelligent discussion, without comments such as this made by some kid (who, it has to be said, was on my side) arguing with a street preacher: “They can’t have written down the Bible - they didn’t have any pencils.”

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1. Quite why a chap allegedly born 2000 years ago in Roman Judaea, who in all probability spoke Aramaic, would have a Spanish name is beyond me. I’ve heard him (not “Him”, thank you…) referred to as “Yeshua of Nazareth”, and one would think that the closest corresponding name is Joshua. Wikipedia says that: “The name “Jesus” is an Anglicization of the Greek Iesous, itself believed to be a transliteration of the Hebrew/Aramaic Yeshua or Yehoshua, meaning “YHWH is salvation”. I bet he got bullied for that name.
2. Which is all of them, bar those stumbling across this site looking for dead/imprisoned friends, the spambots, and Mickel’s dad. (More on statcounter trawling later…)
3. Please don’t look at this in Internet Explorer. I uploaded it to the school’s content managment system while working in Firefox, and, due to supreme idiocy, forgot to check it looked alright in IE. It doesn’t. At all.
4. Wikipedia.
5. As an example, one particularly stupid woman, responding to an earlier letter, claimed that Islamic terrorist couldn’t possibly have anything to with western foreign policy, as the twin tower attacks were before Afghanistan and Iraq. I pointed out that continued agression against Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War was cited by Osama Bin Laden in his 1998 fatwa as one of the crimes of America, as she would have known had she informed herself before forming an opinion.
6. Yes, I’m aware that I have myself come out with some severely malinformed nonsense. I’ve already admitted it.

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I hate trains. I especially hate that awful advert with the native Americans: “Man who go on big train have big idea”.

Anyway… I came home for Christmas by train yesterday, and it took an hour longer thanit should have done. I missed my connection at Bristol as my train was late getting in to Cardiff - it had been delayed at Bridgend after some lunatic left a grenade on the platform.

Apparently - although I stress that this is merely rumour and hearsay - the Bomb Squad were too busy to come out. Too busy? Is it the season for it or something?

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This here journalism combines two things:

1. a need to know everything, and
2. the desire to be heard, to imagine, however fleetingly, that people are actually paying attention to what I’ve been saying, positively or negatively

Naturally, I’d prefer positively.

So when this afternoon Cat found a photocopy - a photocopy! - of my piece on the Stern report, with several paragraphs highlighted, in the ladies’ toilets in university these came crashing together.

What were they doing with it, and why? I’ll probably never know. Point two fulfilled, for good or for bad. Point one’s out though.

(I should stress at this point that the article as it appeared in print bore no more than a passing resemblance to that which I submitted, oweing to some truly dreadful subediting. A shadow of its original self, it was. A shadow.)

UPDATE: Tell a lie, I do have an idea. We’re doing a press conference exercise with the PR students - on the Stern Review. Apparently some of them have been looking at my article, presumably pre-empting my questions.

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This:

is not real.

It had me fooled, briefly.

It was created using POV-Ray software, a program that was originally open-source, created by amateur programmers, on an Amiga machine, and then ported to the PC. It’s an example of something I mentioned on the old blog: high-end computers being responsible for some lazy programming, with developers over-relying on hardware. The fact that this was developed on a low-tech computer meant it had to be as efficient as possible, and can now make better use of newer technology.

(I used to do some 3D graphics stuff when I was a kid. I was - needless to say? - Not Very Good. An inherent tendency to geekiness doesn’t compensate for lack of talent.) 

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I was wrong. Quite, quite wrong.

I claimed that Aids-awareness adverts were completely barking up the wrong tree, that we didn’t need to hammer home how disease spreads, and that people are not ignorant but rather simply irresponsible.

But…

Colin Richardson writes:

There is still a great deal of ignorance about HIV in this country, after all these years. A recent survey conducted for the National AIDS Trust found that 21% thought that HIV could not be passed from one person to another during unprotected sexual intercourse.

Ignorance is not just the preserve of the British. Jacob Zuma, the former deputy president of South Africa and one-time head of that country’s National Aids Council, has said that he didn’t use a condom when having sex with a woman he knew to be HIV-positive because men were at little risk of becoming infected that way. In any case, he added, he took a shower immediately afterwards, which, he claimed, further reduced the risk.

Dear me.

Not only that, but one of Cardiff’s broadcast students had to do some voxpops about STIs. One interviewee, In response to being questioned on whether he would treat HIV-postive people any differently, came out with: “No, but I wouldn’t use the same cup as them and I’d bleach the toilet after they’d used it.”

Ignorance, it appears, is rife. Including, as I was so desperately mistaken, my own.

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There’s a Gloria Estefan song called No hay mal que por bien no venga. Roughly translated: from all bad there comes good.

That, in a lot of ways, is how this blog has been born. I bought the domain name and hosting package thinking that $6.95/month actually meant I’d be paying monthly, only to find that I’d paid two years up front. Which, I think you’ll agree, isn’t ideal.

But it looks pretty cool…

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