The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘society’ Category

There are only 3 accept­able pop­u­lar xmas songs, Dar­lene Love’s “Christ­mas Baby (Please Come Home)” from the Phil Spec­tor Christ­mas album, Bruce Springsteen’s ver­sion of “Santa Claus is Com­ing to Town” and this one, also from the Boss, his cover of “Merry Christ­mas, Baby!”

Go on, get all funky and fes­tive and check out this recent video of Bruce per­form­ing it live on tv:

Weird things hap­pen around the hol­i­days, often unex­pected and not always pleasant.

I don’t know what got me on the sub­ject in my head, I was think­ing about duck and before I knew it, my crazy brain started remem­ber­ing weird shit from my childhood.

The duck con­nec­tion: I am cook­ing a small three-bird roast for xmas dinner.

For those of you who’ve never heard of such a con­coc­tion, it is quite sim­ply, a whole bone­less duck, stuffed with a whole bone­less turkey, then inside the turkey is an entire, bone­less pheas­ant. Larger ver­sions start with a goose, but I’m not serv­ing enough peo­ple to make that sensible.

I’m not sure how the farm­ers get the birds to grow inside the other birds with­out bones, but get­ting the feath­ers off must be a bitch. I guess it has to do with genetic engi­neer­ing, by I digress. I want to talk about duck.

When I was very young, an elderly rel­a­tive lived with us for many years, my Aunt Ger­tie, short for Gertrude. She lived to be 95, died in the mid 1970s and was part of the fos­ter fam­ily that raised my orphaned father.

Yeah, I know, get out the violins.

Aunt Ger­tie lived in our house for four or five years, until her per­sonal care became too much for my mother. Up to that point, her pres­ence meant we didn’t do very much out­side of the house, as she needed fairly con­stant super­vi­sion, even more so when she started falling down frequently.

After my par­ents took the dif­fi­cult deci­sion to place Aunt Ger­tie into a rest home, things changed for us and we had some free­dom again. The very first night she was gone, my father took the fam­ily out to a fancy restau­rant for din­ner. This would have been around autumn 1972, so I would have been nearly 9 years old.

Now, here’s the fowl con­nec­tion, that night in the nice restau­rant, I ordered Duck l’Orange for the first time in my life and it was the most amaz­ing thing I’d ever eaten. It was a half duck, still on the bone and the wait staff actu­ally helped me strip the deli­cious meat from the bone.

Its a fairly vivid mem­ory, and I can still remem­ber the four of us, me, my par­ents and my younger brother all feel­ing slightly guilty that we were able to enjoy such a fine meal, only because Ger­tie was in a care home.

Aunt Ger­tie lived for sev­eral years in that care home, slowly, grad­u­ally los­ing her mind. Up to that point, she was scar­ily sharp and didn’t miss any­thing and it was only in the last year or two that she started to become con­fused about things. She passed away just a cou­ple of weeks before xmas, at the same time my half-brother’s wife was deliv­er­ing her first child in the same hospital.

The last time I saw Ger­tie in the hos­pi­tal was about 10 min­utes before I saw my nephew for the first time. Even at the age of nearly twelve, I realised there was a weird con­nec­tion between new life and death.

Ger­tie died the next day, two weeks before xmas.

But that wasn’t the only death to darken a fam­ily xmas, a year or two before, my father’s fos­ter brother, my Uncle Jack, died unex­pect­edly on xmas. I was prob­a­bly around 10 years old.

I always liked Uncle Jack, he was very much an out­doors­man, he liked to fish and hunt, which are the sort of cool things that impress a young lad like me. He died on xmas eve, my father woke up to the news on xmas day.

Again, I have vivid mem­o­ries of that morn­ing. My brother and I burst down­stairs, ready to attack a pile of presents left by santa, with enthu­si­asm, but our mother’s face told a dif­fer­ent story.

We both imme­di­ately knew some­thing was wrong before she told us about Uncle Jack. She explained how upset my father was, he had not come out of their bed­room yet. I’m sure it was silly early in the morn­ing, my brother and I were both chil­dren and prob­a­bly didn’t sleep a wink the night before.

It was one of the few times I saw my father with real tears in his eyes. He was a strong, impos­ing man, think Hem­ming­way with­out the booze and it shocked me. My dad wasn’t sup­posed to cry, ever!

It was a very low key xmas that year.

All of this is remind­ing me of the scene in the movie Grem­lins, when Phoebe Cates char­ac­ter explains why she hates xmas and tells the story of her father dress­ing up like santa and get­ting caught in the chim­ney. They find him still there, dead, a cou­ple weeks later. Talk about a hol­i­day downer, I bet the stench would put you off your dinner.

Last xmas was eas­ily one of the worst of my life, my beloved mother passed away unexpectedly.

I was at work, ready for a long hol­i­day run of night­shifts when I got the bad news. I found out at 6am on xmas eve that she died.

The thing about deaths around the hol­i­days is that it doesn’t just bring down the rel­a­tives of the deceased, it has an effect on those around you too. It dis­tracts oth­ers away from their enjoy­ment of the sea­son. My sud­den, griev­ing absence from work had an impact on many peo­ple and that upset me even more.

Last year’s xmas was very depress­ing. That’s an under­state­ment, it was dev­as­tat­ing. You get the idea.

When you sit down for your big turkey (or 3 bird roast!) din­ner on xmas day, spare a thought for all the peo­ple whose hol­i­days have been blighted by unex­pected bad news and whose future hol­i­days may be coloured by these events.

More impor­tantly, I sin­cerely hope its not you and yours who is the recip­i­ent of any­thing unto­ward. How­ever, if it is you who draws the short draw and catches some­thing unpleas­ant, know that you’re not alone, it can hap­pen to anyone.

And if it is your turn, just remem­ber that it will get bet­ter and I hope you have plenty more fes­tive sea­sons await­ing you that might in some ways, make up for it.

From every­one here at the northlon­don­hippy, we wish you noth­ing but the very best of the holidays.

Oh wait, its just me here on my own, but the sen­ti­ment very much remains the same!

The Cli­mate Change Sum­mit opens up in Copen­hagen on Mon­day, where a bunch of world lead­ers will add to the prob­lem by pro­duc­ing a lot of hot air, but prob­a­bly no viable solu­tion to this very real problem.

Yep, I believe the cli­mate is chang­ing. I can see it and feel it and have done for a while now. Here in the UK, the win­ters seem milder and though last sum­mer wasn’t one of the hottest on record, it was hot enough. I’ve seen what’s hap­pen­ing to the polar ice caps, not first hand, but com­puter graph­ics aren’t that good, so the footage has to be real.

Is it just a nor­mal cycle? Maybe. Is human activ­ity con­tribut­ing or accel­er­at­ing the process? How could it not? We live in a closed ecosys­tem, our atmos­phere is sealed tight against the vac­uum of space. The more green­house gasses we pump into this sealed bub­ble, the hot­ter it will get.

I don’t want to be a hyp­ocrite, I want to do my part to help pre­vent cli­mate change. I use low energy light bulbs, which aren’t as bright as the old incan­des­cent style. I recy­cle as much as I can, which is messy and time con­sum­ing. And I don’t take unnec­es­sary car jour­neys, which means rid­ing the bus and tube with unwashed strangers.

I know its not much, but its some­thing. I’d like to do more.

That got me think­ing, what more could I do to help slow down cli­mate change? Then it hit me, there’s some­thing we all could do that would have an instant, imme­di­ate and mea­sur­able effect on the amount of green­house gasses released into the environment.

All liv­ing things exhale car­bon diox­ide, or CO2 as its known. Humans are the only liv­ing crea­tures to under­stand this and to be able to adjust their own output.

I’m propos­ing that every human being who is phys­i­cally able, should hold their breath for at least one minute per day. You could do it all in one go, or you can do two 30 sec­ond peri­ods. You could even go longer if you like, but I can’t be held liable if you pass out, fall down and hit your head. I only sug­gested a minute a day.

If every­one held their breath for one minute daily, that would have a huge impact on the amount of CO2 released into the atmos­phere annu­ally. These things add up quickly and if I were a sci­en­tist I could esti­mate how much CO2 would be saved, but I’m not, so I can’t. So we’ll stick to “a lot.”

Look man, if we don’t do some­thing and pretty god­damn soon, breath­ing won’t be an issue that most of us will need to worry about any more.

So I’ll be hold­ing my breath, and not just for one minute every day. I’ll be hold­ing it while our lead­ers meet this month to work out whether they can save the human race. If they do come up with a solu­tion, I’ll cer­tainly be sur­prised, but I’ll also finally be able to exhale.

You don’t want me to turn blue, do you?

Nearly 5 years ago to this very day, I wrote a lit­tle some­thing here on the hippy that is one of my favourite posts ever. Back when I had a top-ten favourite list, this par­tic­u­lar post was fea­tured prominently.

Its called ASS BOMBS

Don’t worry if you can’t be both­ered to re-read it right now, I’ll sum­marise it for you: I spec­u­lated on the lengths future ter­ror­ists would have to go through to sneak explo­sive devices on to planes and the addi­tional secu­rity mea­sures that would have to be put in place to main­tain safety. This wasn’t long Richard Reid tried to blow up his shoes.

I the­o­rised that a ter­ror­ists’ rec­tum would become a com­part­ment for hid­ing plas­tique and air­port secu­rity screen­ers would have to play proc­tol­o­gist to make sure all air trav­ellers were not car­ry­ing any­thing up their bot­toms. Instead of “take off your shoes and remove all metal objects”, their instruc­tion would be to “bend over and spread those cheeks.”

It would cer­tainly put fly­ing into a brand new per­spec­tive. Mak­ing sure you wear clean socks with­out any holes wouldn’t seem so impor­tant any more.

It turns out, I was par­tially right. An alleged Al Qaeda fanatic tried to blow up offi­cials at a meet­ing in Saudi Ara­bia with some TNT shoved up his ass, only the idiot left it stuck up there when it det­o­nated and it only killed the bomber. You’re sup­posed to take it out of your bot­tom before it goes off.

You can read the report here in The Sun news­pa­per, under their clever head­line; “Sui­cide Bum­mer”. Did you see what they did there?

Its unlikely as fuck that Al Qaeda visit my web­site, so they prob­a­bly worked this one out on their own. Now that this fright­en­ing and icky tech­nique is out there, how long before air­ports imple­ment new secu­rity pro­ce­dures? Not long is my guess.

Still, there’s an upside. If you’re going to have to dis­play your ring­piece in air­ports for all to see, anal bleach­ing is set to be the next big growth indus­try. They’ll even have a new slo­gan: “Anal Bleaching…its not just for porn stars any more!”

The pow­ers that be haven’t really sold us on the com­ing cli­mate apocalypse.

I’m not deny­ing its hap­pen­ing, I can clearly see its effects reg­u­larly on a world wide scale, I just don’t think our politi­cians and sci­en­tists have explained it to us very well.

“Cli­mate change” has a PR prob­lem, but don’t worry, I’m going to attempt to offer a sim­ple solution.

The planet Earth itself is not threatened.

There, I said it.

Cli­mate change is not going to destroy this rock we’re stuck on, regard­less of the atmos­pheric tem­per­a­ture, Earth will keep spin­ning through space for a very long time, prob­a­bly until our Sun turns into a Red Giant or Super­nova or what­ever it is stars do and that’s mil­lions of years away.

Cli­mate change might kill every liv­ing thing on the planet, or at least most of them. That should be a strong sell­ing point, only we don’t really care that much about liv­ing things other than humans.

And it seems we don’t care that much about all the humans any­way, only some of them. You know, the ones that look like us, dress like us, talk like us, ummmm, us.

Not them.

But most of all, we care about our­selves. Self-preservation is some­thing we all seem to have in common.

Tack­ling “cli­mate change” has to be about sav­ing one’s self from the com­ing Armaged­don. Fear is always an excel­lent sell­ing point.

Slow­ing cli­mate change will save your life and the lives of every­one you care about. Not slow­ing cli­mate change will prob­a­bly kill us all.

“All of us” includes you. You might really die from the effects of a warmer planet.

If the global tem­per­a­ture goes up, more peo­ple will die from heat-related ill­nesses. Remem­ber all those old French folks who died in the heat­wave in 2003? There’d be a lot more deaths like that.

Got air con­di­tion­ing? If the energy sup­pli­ers can’t keep up with demand, it won’t mat­ter and you’ll still fry.

Large, cur­rently heav­ily pop­u­lated areas of the planet will become unin­hab­it­able, poten­tially dis­plac­ing mil­lions. All those refugees will have to go some­where, which will increase crowd­ing in more tem­per­ate regions while stretch­ing dwin­dling resources beyond capac­ity. Life will become more dif­fi­cult to sustain.

Trop­i­cal dis­eases with­out known cures will spread out from the cur­rent hot zones to increas­ingly wider areas and even more peo­ple will die.

Food pro­duc­tion will be dis­rupted, prompt­ing star­va­tion on an unimag­in­able scale.

I’ve read that Lon­don has only a 48 hour food sup­ply at any given time, because of the way super­mar­ket stock is man­aged. Food prac­ti­cally goes from lorry to shelf with­out sit­ting long in the back room. Its a deliver-as-required system.

If your local super­mar­kets ran dry, how would you feed your­self and your fam­ily? Even if you stock­pile long-life meals, they’ll run out even­tu­ally. Think you can get a farm up and run­ning before it does? Assum­ing there’s still enough water and the sun’s not so hot that it fries your plants and live­stock before you have the chance to take the first tasty bite.

Unre­strained cli­mate change means death for you.

Its sim­ple math really, if we don’t do some­thing soon, we’re all gonna end up dead.

It won’t be the end of the planet, or the end of the world, but it will be the end of us.

And that includes you.

Sud­denly, those low energy light­bulbs don’t seem so bad and sep­a­rat­ing your recy­clable goods doesn’t seem like such a chore, does it?

A bunch of world lead­ers are head­ing to Copen­hagen this Decem­ber to go through the motions of a Cli­mate Change sum­mit. Per­haps, if they adopted the fol­low­ing slo­gan, peo­ple might finally start pay­ing attention:

Cli­mate Change = Death

And once everyone’s pay­ing atten­tion, per­haps we all can start tak­ing the right steps to slow down cli­mate change. The life you save just might be your own.

The National Health Ser­vice (NHS) here in the UK has been in the fir­ing line this week as Amer­i­cans “debate” over­haul­ing their health­care sys­tem in an attempt to extend access to their 50 mil­lion res­i­dents who have absolutely no cover or access to care.

Amer­i­cans are being led to believe that the free health­care avail­able to all of us in the UK is no good. This is so far from the truth that it would be funny, except for the fact that people’s lives hang in the balance.

The UK has a much higher life expectancy than the USA. Check your sta­tis­tics and see that I’m not lying. The UK also spends less on health­care per per­son than they do in the states, yet they yield bet­ter results.

Go fig­ure!

The Amer­i­can health­care sys­tem is run like a for-profit busi­ness. Think about that, some­one prof­its from your ill­ness and the per­cent­ages of profit are obscenely high.

Insur­ance com­pa­nies, drug com­pa­nies pri­vate hos­pi­tals, pri­vate doc­tors are all in the game to make money from your mis­ery. That can’t be right, can it? Every test ordered that you don’t really need, every over-prescription is money in the bank for someone.

Just ask Michael Jack­son if pri­vate health­care on demand is a good thing. Oh wait, you can’t because it killed him.

In Amer­ica, health­care is seen as a priv­i­lege, not a basic human right. Should one only be enti­tled to health­care on the basis of qual­i­fy­ing for insur­ance, rather than qual­i­fy­ing for need? Shouldn’t every­one have access to healthcare?

Of course they should!

Some of the scenes I’ve caught on tele­vi­sion, of the so-called town-hall meet­ings have been very amus­ing, well amus­ing in as much as the igno­rance fuelled anger is sim­ply surreal.

It seems to me, that the loud­est voices at these town-hall meet­ings are com­ing out of the mouths of peo­ple with the least infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject. These sad, twisted, igno­rant peo­ple have an unjus­ti­fi­able hatred of Pres­i­dent Obama that is prob­a­bly rooted in their inher­ent racism rather than any actual dis­like of a new health­care system.

All you need to do is lis­ten to what they say, their buzz words, like “social­ism” and “this isn’t the Amer­ica I know” to under­stand just how mis­guided and ill-informed these folks are on the subject.

Ok, any subject.

At the heart of all of this is FOX News, the biased and unfair pseudo news net­work owned by Rupert Mur­doch. FOX News pro­vide the stilted talk­ing points and their legions of view­ers turn up at town-hall meet­ings, par­rot­ing the same lame shit.

I can’t say I’ve looked into it, but I am guess­ing a wealthy guy like Mur­doch must have busi­ness inter­ests out­side the media world, say per­haps insur­ance or drug com­pa­nies. In other words, he may have a vested finan­cial inter­est in how this debate plays out. And if not him, then some of his rich robber-baron mates have got invest­ments in the med­ical field. There’s a lot of profit to be protected.

Its funny how SKY News, the sis­ter sta­tion of FOX News, under the News­Corp cor­po­rate umbrella is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent tack here, right­eously defend­ing the NHS against the FOX News inspired attacks. Does one hand not know what the other is doing? Or is SKY sim­ply pan­der­ing to their UK-based subscribers?

I think we both know the answer to that one.

I’m in a fairly unique posi­tion, hav­ing lived con­sid­er­able lengths of time under both health­care sys­tems. Nei­ther the US or UK sys­tems are per­fect, both excel at some things and lack in oth­ers, but over­all, I know which sys­tem I would choose, if I had to…

The NHS all the way!

In the UK, I’ve never had any con­cerns about insur­ance, access to the med­ical sys­tem or being able to afford the costs. I’ve for the most part, had excel­lent care of a world class stan­dard cour­tesy of the NHS.

In Amer­ica I’ve been charged one hun­dred bucks for a wooden tongue depresser — you know what I’m talk­ing about, a wide wooden pop­si­cle stick.

Open your mouth and say “ahhh fuck, you just charged me a Ben­jamin to do that!”

In my world, life is usu­ally quite sim­ple and this unhealthy debate is no dif­fer­ent. What it boils down to is this: “I’ve already got mine, so screw you if you don’t have yours!” It all comes down to com­pas­sion and America’s appar­ent lack of it.

The Chris­t­ian right in Amer­ica preach some­thing known as “com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­vatism”, but sadly they don’t prac­tise it in any mean­ing­ful or tan­gi­ble way. Where’s the com­pas­sion? What would that guy Jesus do?

Jesus would move to the UK, sign on to the dole and get those holes in his hands and feet looked at for free, same for that nasty stab wound in his side.

Uni­ver­sal health­care is an unde­ni­able right, yet 50 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are being denied it. Any com­pas­sion­ate per­son would recog­nise the inequal­ity in the cur­rent sys­tem and want to do all they could to change it.

Where are all the com­pas­sion­ate folks in Amer­ica? Don’t they care about their fel­low man? Maybe if there are any, they could go to those silly town-hall meet­ings and shout down all the igno­rant idiots that are mak­ing Amer­ica look so stupid.

Oh and while I’m at it, lay off the NHS. Ill-informed opin­ion does not make a debate, it just makes you look even more like morons to the rest of the (bet­ter informed) world.

That’s a fairly bold state­ment up there in the title. How will I ever live up to its promise?

Sim­ple, its com­pletely trans­formed how I inter­act with the inter­net. (And please note not “sim­ples”. I am sick of that shit already).

Again, another fairly large claim about a “com­plete trans­for­ma­tion” of my surf­ing habits.

I ain’t lyin’ neither.

In the old days, I used a browser to explore the inter­net. I’d plug some­thing into a search engine and let it trans­port me to another site, which might then lead me to yet another site, and so on and so forth, until I returned to the search engine to start again. Of course, I book­marked sites too, but the point is I had to think of a site I wished to check out, then nav­i­gate to it again.

Over time, I devel­oped my own inter­net rit­u­als, vis­it­ing my favourite sites on a reg­u­lar or semi-regular basis, check­ing for new con­tent. This style of surf­ing meant I would occa­sion­ally arrive at a site to dis­cover it hadn’t changed since my last visit, but I wouldn’t find that out until the page loaded and wasted some of my valu­able online time.

And then, I dis­cov­ered RSS feeds and read­ers. Sud­denly, I didn’t have to visit all of my favourite sites to check for any­thing, instead I waited for their head­lines to arrive in my reg­u­larly refreshed RSS reader. If I wanted to explore the arti­cle fur­ther, I could click once and eas­ily open the page in my browser.

But RSS read­ers don’t work in real time, there’s no push-type sys­tem to receive the head­lines. Instead, they refresh auto­mat­i­cally at a pre-defined inter­val or if you are a bit obses­sive like me, man­u­ally refresh­ing every 10 sec­onds just in case. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.

Then I dis­cov­ered Twit­ter and Twit­ter clients. The “client” part is impor­tant, because if you’re access­ing Twit­ter via your browser, you are miss­ing out on some of its use­ful­ness. I’ll come back to that.

Twit­ter is more than just read­ing about what peo­ple had for break­fast. There are other meals and snacks to read about too.

No, what I really mean is beyond fol­low­ing indi­vid­u­als, you can also fol­low web­sites. Web­sites with RSS feeds can marry them up with a ser­vice like Twit­ter­Feed and auto-generate a tweet link­ing to new con­tent pub­lished on their site.

I use Twit­ter­Feed here on my site and it auto-generates a tweet to my Twit­ter account, @nthlondonhippy with the title & first line of the post, along with a short­ened bit ly link to the full text.

Admit­tedly my site is not the busiest in the world, but if you are fol­low­ing me on Twit­ter, you will be alerted to any new con­tent. Even if you are not fol­low­ing me, you still may dis­cover the tweet and it might even be how you ended up here right now.

I would spec­u­late that around a third of the accounts I fol­low on Twit­ter are auto-generated from web­sites I reg­u­larly visit. Head­lines and links flow onto my computer’s desk­top via my pre­ferred Twit­ter client, which at present is TweetDeck.

I fol­low many news out­lets, loads of the Guardian newspaper’s Twit­ter accounts, the New York Times, var­i­ous Apple and gad­get sites, celebrity news sites, con­spir­acy sites, all sorts really. My tastes are var­ied and diverse, but luck­ily so are the choices avail­able to every­one on Twit­ter. If you’re inter­ested in some­thing, chances are there’s a Twit­ter feed (or 20!) that would cater to you.

Twit­ter is also a fright­en­ing good source for break­ing news. As Twit­ter exists in the “nearly now” and moves in real time, when some­thing hap­pens any­where in the world, it doesn’t take long for it to bub­ble up to the surface.

There’s an organ­i­sa­tion that uses Twit­ter for just this pur­pose, @BreakingNews — BNO News, which is run by a 19 year-old in the Nether­lands. They’re scary fast and often beat the more tra­di­tional old-style media out­lets by 10–15 min­utes. In the age of “now”, that’s quite an edge.

And yes, I do work in the old-media, but it doesn’t worry me. The smart old-media out­fits will adapt and change with tech­nol­ogy and most of them have started already. Twit­ter is re-writing the rules here too.

This is where a Twit­ter client really comes into its own. If you’re log­ging onto Twit­ter via their web­site, you are pre­sented with a fairly usable inter­face, with one flaw, it doesn’t refresh auto­mat­i­cally. To see new tweets, you must man­u­ally refresh the page. It works, but its not ideal.

A Twit­ter client is a stand-alone app, that sits inde­pen­dently on your desk­top and they can refresh in real time or nearly. Many of them are feature-rich and allow you to do all sorts of cool things with Twit­ter, often with one-click.

I have been using Tweet­Deck for a while, but there are oth­ers avail­able, most of them have free ver­sions, so you can try them out and see if they work for you. I like Tweet­Deck because it is col­umn based and is col­lapsable into a sin­gle col­umn, which is how I run it most of the time.

With Tweet­Deck, you can have sep­a­rate columns for your main feed, your men­tions, your DMs plus you can cre­ate other columns to fil­ter your stream even more. You can search with a hash­tag and see real-time results and you can cre­ate groups from your main fol­low­ers list too.

You can also do things like reply, send a DM or retweet with one click, as well as fol­low­ing and unfol­low­ing with the same ease.

With it set up like this, a quick occa­sional glance keeps me up to date and can alert me to any­thing that might inter­est me, while I do other things on my com­puter. Like write this post.

While I’ve been work­ing on this fine piece of Twit­ter related prose, I’ve helped some­one with an iMovie ’09 ques­tion and replied to sev­eral tweets addressed directly to me. I don’t see it as a dis­trac­tion, but rather it aug­ments what­ever I’m doing and in this case, actu­ally informs and enriches it.

If I have any sort of ques­tion that I haven’t been able to answer with more tra­di­tional means, like search engines or forum posts, I’ll tweet it. Before long, an answer will come back, one that wouldn’t have been easy to find any other way. Call it the col­lec­tive knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of every­one inter­act­ing on Twit­ter at that moment, or the “hive mind” if you will, but what­ever you call it, it is a quite pow­er­ful tool.

You can instantly col­lect opin­ions and reac­tions to some­thing from a broad cross sec­tion of the planet, or find local knowl­edge of an event or sit­u­a­tion right now.

Twit­ter has become my point of call for just about every­thing online. I use it to keep track of the news, of web­sites I like and sub­jects that mat­ter to me. I engage in dia­logue with other, like minded peo­ple, shar­ing my own knowl­edge while at the same time, ben­e­fit­ing from other’s.

More sig­nif­i­cantly, I don’t surf in the same way I used to; I don’t really browse using a browser any more. Instead of seek­ing out sub­jects of inter­est to me, I have them streamed onto my desk­top con­tin­u­ously and in real-time, cherry pick­ing the spe­cific pages I want to see and only then open­ing them up in my browser.

Just as the inter­net has evolved in the last 10 years, from slow dial-up con­nec­tions with mainly text-only pages to fast, always on-broadband and media-rich con­tent, our ways of inter­act­ing with the inter­net have changed too.

Twit­ter has become my inter­net aggre­ga­tor, my media and infor­ma­tion fil­ter. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it too soon to tell?

How about you?

Has Twit­ter changed your surf­ing habits? Do you use it as I do? Or have you found some other ben­e­fit I may be over­look­ing? I’d gen­uinely like to hear from any­one who might have any thoughts, so please feel free to tweet me and include my Twit­ter ID: @nthlondonhippy in your tweet, to make sure I see it and respond. Thanks!

You might not have heard, but Michael Jack­son kicked the bucket recently. You’d think that sort of news would get around.

In truth, it did get around, shock­ingly fast. Thanks to TMZ.com and Twit­ter, the sad news spread around the world at the speed of tweet.

And just for today, MJ doesn’t mean mar­i­juana here, it stands for Michael Jackson.

I was work­ing the night he died, just head­ing into the office as the news broke.

I was early and paused out­side the build­ing to have one last smoke before going to my desk. As I flicked through a Twit­ter app on my iPhone. I caught one of the first tweets that stated MJ had been rushed to hos­pi­tal in an ambu­lance with a sus­pected heart attack.

A col­league of mine joined me at this point and as he lit up a cig­a­rette of his own, I told him what I had just read and we started spec­u­lat­ing on “what if” it turned out to be the worst case and he was dead.

For both of us, work­ing overnight in a news­room, MJ’s death trans­lated into utter fuck­ing chaos for many, many hours. What­ever the out­come, I knew it was going to be a nasty-assed night.

In real­ity, it exceeded my expectations.

Beyond that, the rest of my night at work is not really impor­tant. It was yet another busy one, deal­ing with a large break­ing story. I’ve had count­less nights like that.

It wasn’t until after that night, and the sub­se­quent few at work, that I really had the chance to con­sider the sig­nif­i­cance and mag­ni­tude of his death. That’s not meant to be an over­state­ment, its huge news that will carry on run­ning for a long time, as will MJ Inc. which will exploit his pass­ing even more than the media ever could.

Before you start think­ing I’m some mega-fan of MJ’s, I’d like to take a moment to point out that I’m not. I didn’t hate his music either and I can appre­ci­ate his unde­ni­able tal­ent, I was just never a fan of his solo stuff.

As a child, I did like the Jack­son 5, but it was prac­ti­cally children’s music. A-B-C, its easy as 1–2-3… It was like Sesame Street does Motown, before Sesame Street existed.

I liked some of his music videos, because they were inno­v­a­tive, ground was bro­ken with sev­eral, but I never bought an MJ record.

I should also men­tion that I believed the alle­ga­tions about him. Always did, still do. Per­haps its just my view of the smoke+fire equa­tion, but every­thing I read about it, makes me think there’s some­thing to it.

Every­one seems to be skip­ping over that part of the story right now, per­haps I should too.

I’m old enough to have vivid mem­o­ries of Elvis Pres­ley dying. Its dif­fi­cult to really explain how momen­tous this was at the time. Elvis was even younger than MJ when he died, all bloated, pinch­ing a loaf while squat­ting on the bowl.

Not a pretty picture.

Elvis was big when he was alive, they didn’t call him “the King” for noth­ing, but in death Elvis was even big­ger. You only have to look at his estate’s accounts to see that he’s grossed more money since he died than he ever did alive.

Now, think of the “King of Pop”, or MJ Inc. as I’ve been think­ing of it. MJ’s music is more mod­ern, his audi­ence is still on the young side. Elvis’s audi­ence was mature when he ate his last fried banana sand­wich, yet he has still kept on selling.

Also, MJ’s music sounds more mod­ern, it can eas­ily sit on the radio along side music being released today. An Elvis song sounds old, because they pretty much all are now; per­haps “dated” would be a more appro­pri­ate description.

I liked Elvis, I thought he was cool, at least until his 1968 come­back spe­cial. If you’ve never seen it, it really is worth your time. After that, he kind of became a par­ody of him­self, which was sad to see. I do have one Elvis CD, a com­pi­la­tion of his Num­ber 1 hits.

And even though I like Elvis, I’ve still man­aged to make a cou­ple of jokes at his expense. Imag­ine the MJ jokes I could make; or bet­ter yet, don’t imag­ine, just think of some you’ve already heard from your mates.

Only the really funny ones, please.

Its too soon, we have to con­tinue to feign rev­er­ence for a while longer, before we can stop whis­per­ing the jokes and speak them out in full voice, in a crowded room, to thun­der­ous laugh­ter with­out a hint of shame. Try it now and all you’ll get are muf­fled gig­gles and unde­ni­able gasps.

No one dubbed MJ the “King of Pop”, the title was self-anointed fol­low­ing a spon­ta­neous intro­duc­tion when being pre­sented with an award. Once adopted, MJ’s PR peo­ple forced the media to refer to him as “King of Pop” and after a while it stuck.

Now, no one could take that crown away from him if they tried.

His death was tragic, as is any death at a rel­a­tively young age, but his is made more so because of his immense tal­ent. If ever there was a tor­tured artist…

MJ didn’t have a con­ven­tional child­hood. How could he when he was rehears­ing and per­form­ing from such a young age. His father sounded like quite a taskmas­ter, which is polite speak for moti­vat­ing Michael and his broth­ers by beatin’ on their ass(es).

Michael told Oprah as much on tv, so it must be true.

MJ was screwed up, dys­func­tional even, but I believe the cur­rent, accepted term to describe him is: eccentric.

The prob­lem with being the King, be it Elvis or MJ, is no one ever says “no” to you. For Elvis, it was fatty foods and pre­scrip­tion drugs, for MJ, well we can be fairly cer­tain it wasn’t fatty foods.

If we believe what we’re read­ing in the media, then MJ was using all sorts of doc­tor pre­scribed good­ies that most likely killed him. Most dis­turb­ing is the report of one of the drugs being Propinal (AKA Diprovan), a pow­er­ful anaes­thetic that should only be admin­is­tered in a hos­pi­tal because it is a con­tin­u­ous IV drip and requires full mon­i­tor­ing by a qual­i­fied doc­tor. The risks include res­pi­ra­tory arrest, which is fancy doctor-speak for: shit, he’s com­pletely stopped breathing!

Fuck. Why didn’t I hear of this before? Talk about a celebrity endorse­ment! Where can I get my own pri­vate med­ical doc­tor to come round and make a few days just zip right by, while I’m comatose and prob­a­bly mil­lime­tres from death? All the cool kids are going to want to do some POP (PrOPinal = POP as in the King of, its new, street name).

How messed up in the head do you have to be to want to be dosed up like you were hav­ing your appen­dix removed? How much would you want to escape both the entire world and yourself?

And what sort of licensed physi­cian would admin­is­ter that to some­one pri­vately, in their own home? Don’t they take an oath that says some­thing like, “First, do no harm?”

Play­ing with anaes­thet­ics sounds seri­ously harm­ful to me.

Which brings me back to where I started, with this becom­ing an ongo­ing news story. One of the biggest, most con­tro­ver­sial pop stars in the world died sud­denly, pos­si­bly at the hands of some­one else.

Yes, I am talk­ing murder.

And so is the LA Police, or so it would seem to me. Just because they say they don’t sus­pect foul play, doesn’t mean they don’t sus­pect some­thing foul happened.

If I was to gam­ble, I’d say some­one will end up being charged in con­nec­tion with his death. Some­one will become known as the man (or woman) who killed Michael Jackson.

And even though his funeral and pub­lic memo­r­ial are today, this story will run for years and years.

Expect more rev­e­la­tions about his pri­vate life to be com­pet­ing with the twists and turns in the legal bat­tles, crim­i­nal and civil, while he con­tin­ues to break records for music sales and MJ Inc. makes hun­dreds of millions.

What does it say about our soci­ety that we can wor­ship some­one for their tal­ent, while being fas­ci­nated by their eccen­tric­ity, yet repulsed by their alleged proclivities?

As a char­ac­ter, MJ is about as com­plex and rich a tapes­try as you’re likely to find.

And what does it say about our soci­ety that so many tal­ented peo­ple, in so many dif­fer­ent areas of the arts, are so trag­i­cally fucked up? MJ’s not the first mega-star to suc­cumb to such a sad end.

He won’t be the last, either.

I flirted with Twit­ter for around 6 months before I prop­erly signed up and started tweet­ing. I didn’t really get it at first, which is not unusual, for it has become a vir­tual sub-culture on the inter­net, with its own rules and eti­quette, that must be observed if you wish to play a part.

By rules, I don’t mean any­thing offi­cial, per­haps con­ven­tions or an infor­mal code of prac­tise would be more accu­rate, but for sim­plic­i­ties sake, I’ll stick to “rules”.

As I’ve used Twit­ter, I’ve devel­oped my own set of rules, or rather they’ve evolved as I’ve learned bit by bit what works for me.

And that’s what I believe is the key to Twit­ter, learn­ing what “works for you”. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple use it in dif­fer­ent ways and I’m going to share few things I’ve picked up since I started tweeting.

Fol­low­ing people:

At first, I really didn’t know who to fol­low beyond @wossy and @stephenfry and while they are both enter­tain­ing and pro­lific tweet­ers, it wasn’t enough to make Twit­ter worth my time. And its one thing fol­low­ing celebri­ties, they expect your atten­tion and ado­ra­tion, but how do you find other peo­ple to follow?

I was a bit shy about fol­low­ing peo­ple at first, after all you are choos­ing to learn a great deal about some­one who is a ran­dom stranger on the inter­net, but I’m far less so now.

When I started, I only really fol­lowed peo­ple who fol­lowed me first. Silly, eh? Don’t be afraid to fol­low some­one if you want to, even if their updates are pro­tected with a pad­lock. Mostly, that’s to keep out spam­mers and porn­bots, not gen­uine peo­ple like you. Occa­sion­ally, an account is truly pri­vate, but I’ve yet to per­son­ally encounter one.

Nearly all of us are on Twit­ter because we want to be fol­lowed. And who wouldn’t want some cool rockin’ hippy like me trail­ing them in cyber­space? Now tell me, what colour is your thong today?

Unfol­low­ing:

Occa­sion­ally, I unfol­low some­one and if it is you I unfol­lowed, I don’t mean any dis­re­spect. The biggest rea­son I unfol­low peo­ple is they tweet too often and its mean­ing­less crap — and that’s my job on Twitter!

Recently, I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple because of the con­tent of their tweets. I’m rarely offended, so if you man­aged to offend me, you’ve said some­thing extremely loath­some. And I’ve unfol­lowed peo­ple who’ve signed up for adver­tis­ing tweets — I don’t want your stream to be inter­rupted by a word from YOUR spon­sor. It reduces Twitter’s value for everyone.

Fol­low­ers:

Its not a num­bers game. Don’t be suck­ered into think­ing that it is.

At first, I was con­cerned about how many fol­low­ers I had, and what peo­ple would think of me, if I didn’t have many. I soon learned the num­ber of peo­ple fol­low­ing you doesn’t mat­ter as much as the qual­ity of your fol­low­ers. And if the qual­ity of your tweets is high, you will attract fol­low­ers soon enough.

If you have a smaller num­ber of like-minded peo­ple fol­low­ing you, that beats mil­lions of ran­dom fol­low­ers any day.

If I cared about the num­bers, I’d let all the spam­mers and mar­ke­teers con­tinue to fol­low me, but I don’t — I block them. If I did leave them in place, it would prob­a­bly dou­ble my num­ber of followers.

If you fol­low me, I won’t auto­mat­i­cally fol­low you back. I might fol­low you, but only after I’ve had a look at your pro­file to see if your style of tweets would be inter­est­ing to me. If I don’t fol­low you, please don’t be offended. I only take a quick look and then make a snap deci­sion. Some­times I get it wrong.

And if you want me to fol­low you, just send me an @ mes­sage and I will. There are too many “online mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists” who can help me make money on Twit­ter try­ing to fol­low me, or girls who want to show me their sexy pri­vate pic­tures, for it to be sen­si­ble to auto­mat­i­cally fol­low back.

Find­ing people:

I stum­ble upon new peo­ple all the time, in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Some­times, some­one using a hash­tag I’m track­ing will catch my attention.

I often look at who other peo­ple are fol­low­ing or fol­lowed by as well. And on occa­sion, I see some­one I’m fol­low­ing exchang­ing @ mes­sages with some­one and while fol­low­ing the con­ver­sa­tion thread, the new per­son catches my attention.

A lot of peo­ple think #fol­lowfri­day is another good way to find new peo­ple, as its the day to rec­om­mend new peo­ple for you to fol­low. I have to be hon­est, I still don’t really get the eti­quette of the whole thing. To me, every one of the nearly 500 accounts I’m fol­low­ing are worth it, or I wouldn’t be fol­low­ing them. So I choose peo­ple to rec­om­mend, know­ing I’ve prob­a­bly unin­ten­tion­ally left some­one very wor­thy out, or I’ve embar­rassed some­one by rec­om­mend­ing them. Clearly, I’m too neu­rotic to be play­ing in pub­lic with strangers.

My tweets:

I make a lot of jokes, or at least I try to, but some fall flat on their faces. I am occa­sion­ally seri­ous, sin­cere, angry (more than occa­sion­ally), but mostly I am sar­cas­tic with a dash of irony.

I tend to treat Twit­ter like one giant open-mike night and let my inner-comedian run wild. If you worked with me or hung out with me in per­son, it wouldn’t be much dif­fer­ent, only I would type less.

The impor­tant thing is I don’t tweet any­thing that I would be embar­rassed or ashamed of later. I’m polite and friendly to oth­ers, but most impor­tantly I am true to myself.

It helps that I’ve blogged a long time and have learned how much of myself to share with the wider world. Too fuck­ing much!

DM’s and @ messages:

I try to reply to all I receive, as long as you are not offer­ing me a free Mac­Book Air or telling me how to get 16K fol­low­ers in a week, and make money doing it!

If I haven’t replied to your mes­sage, its because I prob­a­bly missed it. And Twitter’s not per­fect, as some mes­sages and tweets get missed out from client to client. I know this because I use a vari­ety of meth­ods to read my tweets and mes­sages and I can see that some­times things aren’t exactly the same from client to client or device to device.

Twit­ter is fast mov­ing plus I keep weird hours most of the time so I do occa­sion­ally miss things.

If its impor­tant, mes­sage me again — I’d rather have your mes­sage twice, then have you think I was ignor­ing you.

I’m happy to hear from any­one, espe­cially if you’re in Nige­ria or a mem­ber of the US mil­i­tary in Iraq and look­ing to trans­fer large sums of cash into my bank account.

Invest time

You need to prop­erly invest time inter­act­ing on Twit­ter. You can’t just send the same tweet over and over, sell­ing your prod­uct or ser­vice. Peo­ple won’t pay atten­tion, they’ll clas­sify you as noise.

Start out slowly, grad­u­ally build­ing your net­work. Give more than you receive on Twit­ter, if you can answer someone’s ques­tion accu­rately, then do it. Don’t be self-centred or self-serving — peo­ple can smell it a mile off and will avoid you.

Know what you want from Twit­ter:

This is the best advice I’ve found on using Twit­ter, so I will pass it along. Think about what you want to get out of Twit­ter and be focused on that.

If you want to extend your social net­work, or use it to pro­mote a prod­uct or ser­vice, go for it, but do it well. There are many guides avail­able on how best to use Twit­ter for your busi­ness. Heed their advice.

I won’t lie, I joined to pro­mote my web­site and “brand”. Are you shocked? Sad­dened? Will you not look upon me with the same ado­ra­tion you had for me yes­ter­day? I’m crushed.

Its worked, I’ve seen a dra­matic upward spike in vis­i­tors to my site since I started tweet­ing regularly.

What I didn’t expect but found any­way, is a com­mu­nity of extremely nice, kind, help­ful, gen­uine people.

I’m quite reclu­sive by nature and more than a bit of a loner, but I find myself exchang­ing @ mes­sages with peo­ple quite fre­quently. Its an unan­tic­i­pated, yet wel­come ben­e­fit of being a mem­ber of the Twit­ter community.

Now, I won­der how many of them would loan me some money? I don’t need a lot, just a few grand to get this shy­lock off my back. You don’t want to see a cer­tain north Lon­don based hippy with shat­tered knee-caps, do you?

Dig it, hep cats. Your hippy’s back and he’s big­ger, bad­der and higher than ever!

Ok, some of that first state­ment may not be true. Please allow me to decon­struct it for you:

- I haven’t been any­where, there­fore I can’t be “back”

- I’m still the same height I’ve been since I was 16. I’m not “big­ger”, unless you count my ego and I don’t.

- I’ve always been pretty bad, short of mur­der­ing some­one, I don’t think it would be pos­si­ble for me to be “badder”.

- I’m always high, so how could be “higher”? “Higher” than what?

So basi­cally, I’ve already wasted 30 sec­onds of your valu­able surf­ing time with utter non­sense and bull­shit. What a start!

Truth is, much like Lon­don, my brain is a bit fried from the heat. This week’s been a bit unbear­able. And don’t for­get the humidity!

How could I ever for­get the sick­en­ing, thick heavy feel of the atmos­phere around me this week? It would be fine if I was on hol­i­day in the Med on a sandy beach, lying in the shade with frozen daiquiris brought to me when­ever I snapped my fin­gers, but I’m not. Instead, I’m stuck in my north Lon­don ghetto hell.

My lair is bril­liant in the win­ter, it holds on to heat like nobody’s busi­ness, but in the sum­mer that qual­ity is a curse. Also, I have a small, south­ern fac­ing con­ser­va­tory, which acts as a super-efficient solar heater for the entire house. It hit a balmy 46 degrees C in there this week, which eas­ily boosts the over­all temp in my house to 32 or 33 degrees C.

In other words, fuck­ing hot!

And before you ask, the con­ser­va­tory does have blinds, on the ceil­ing and win­dows, light coloured, but they don’t seem to make a dif­fer­ence. I’m con­sid­er­ing replac­ing them with totally opaque blinds, that reflect light and heat. I’ve thought about it before, but its a big job that I couldn’t do myself.

Any­way, I’ve got count­less fans, a cou­ple of dehu­mid­i­fiers (which rock!) and a giant air con­di­tioner, which help a bit, but can’t com­pete with the fierce effects of the con­ser­va­tory. I can just about make it com­fort­able to sit on the sofa in my liv­ing room, but so much as shift posi­tion or god-forbid stand up, and its sud­denly like enter­ing a sauna.

Lon­don wasn’t built for trop­i­cal weather, cer­tainly my 100+ year old house wasn’t. Its early in the sum­mer to be swel­ter­ing like this.

I don’t see how any­one can deny cli­mate change when they have litres of sweat run­ning off their fore­heads and into their eyes. Trust me, it stings.

I won­der if I could get plan­ning per­mis­sion to put a swim­ming pool into my tiny back gar­den. Clearly noth­ing Olympic sized, just a small plunge pool for cool­ing off. How much of a bribe would it take? And how much would the pool cost?

All more than I would want to spend.

One just has to accept that its going to be a long, hot, hor­ri­ble sum­mer in the city and do what­ever you can to just get through it.

And if the heat doesn’t getcha, there’s always the swine flu.

Health author­i­ties in the UK announced this week that swine flu can now not be con­tained, and they are expect­ing 100,000 new cases a day by the end of August. I also read that as many as 40 peo­ple a day could be dying from it in that time as well. Shouldn’t we be panicking?

We’re not pan­ick­ing because its all very abstract. It will become much scarier when you hear about swine flu tak­ing some­one you know. If this is going to be as bad as they say, we’ll all find our­selves in the posi­tion of know­ing a vic­tim even­tu­ally. Oh dear.

So far, there have only been 4 deaths from swine flu in the UK and all of them have had the fol­low­ing code used to describe their deaths: they also suf­fered from under­ly­ing health issues. In other words, you’re more likely to die if you have some­thing else seri­ously wrong with you.

That prob­a­bly won’t always be the case and it will start killing oth­er­wise healthy, fit peo­ple. Ut oh.

Damn, I’ve come over all apoc­a­lyp­tic. Well, when faced with the fires of hell and a pig-based plague from Satan, do you blame me?