Quotation marks? About 9 out of 10.

Quote of the Day

"This guy's walkin' down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can't get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, "Hey you! Can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, "Father, I'm down in this hole; can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey, Joe, it's me. Can ya help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are ya stupid? Now we're both down here." The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out.?"
-Leo McGarry, from The West Wing (1999-2006)

Thanks to Least I could do for this one.

Freedom of Preach

My earlier freedom of speech post was a thinly veiled reference to things going on in the real world. In America a Supreme Court ruling in 1995, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission has shaped their freedom of speech and the right to anonymity that it associates:

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

In anonymity is the tool that allows the few to speak against the voice of the many - by associating ones identity with ones words we risk losing our freedom from repercussions over our opinions. Anonymity is something that we have to actively work for - it is not enough when working online to have a secret identity, as everything can be traced back to its author with virtually no work at all. Having read my blog you could easily find out who I am, where I live, and anything else.

Because of this many people decide to go without anonymity - there are hundreds of Facebook groups that allow people to publicly assign themselves to a cause. I blog next to a picture of myself - anyone could see me with virtually no effort - why hide when hiding is pointless? Because of this, however, it sometimes feels like we cannot write what we think or feel. Others write their own truths knowingly without anonymity, relying on our society to recognise that the truth cannot be considered libelous, cannot be considered slanderous, and is the truth. Sometimes our society fails to protect them.

I have seen this today, and if I wrote more I would join in this loss of freedom. It is disgusting.

Georgie Boy

George Orwell was all kinds of genius. I always had a feeling that this was the case - from reading Animal Farm at school to reading 1984 since leaving university, but having read his 1949 essay "The Moon Under Water" I can confirm it. Enjoy:



The Moon Under Water
by George Orwell
Evening Standard, 9 February 1946

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of "regulars" who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its "atmosphere."

To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull's head over the mantelpiece —everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies' bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.

Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women —two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone "dear," irrespective of age or sex. ("Dear," not "Ducky": pubs where the barmaid calls you "ducky" always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about Jetting you use the telephone.

You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.

Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch —for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll—for about three shillings.

The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.

On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children —and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.

The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be —at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don't know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.

I know pubs where the beer is good but you can't get meals, others where you can get meals but which are noisy and crowded, and others which are quiet but where the beer is generally sour. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London pubs that possess them.

But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout, and no china mugs.

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.

I need you to tell me it's OK

Editors are a damn good band, I feel like I had forgotten that of late. Now me, them, a glass of water and a novel of social philosophies are off to bed.

Dooce Bag

Dooced: to lose one’s job because of one’s website.

Or, from the (sorry) horses mouth:

I started this website in February 2001. A year later I was fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace. My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID. Never write about work on the internet unless your boss knows and sanctions the fact that YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT WORK ON THE INTERNET. If you are the boss, however, you should be aware that when you order Prada online and then talk about it out loud that you are making it very hard for those around you to take you seriously.

(Dooce.com/about)

Things on the internet can be messed up. It is a rapidly developing area that literally is changing every few minutes. The memes of yesterday are the 4chan fodder of today. As such, it is also leading to a very interesting situation as regards this "web 2.0" thing that we all hear so much about. Web 2.0 is generally considered to be the interactive, social, adaptable internet that Facebook, Twitter and Blogger, amongst hundreds of others, have produced. At any time we can log onto our twitter and write what we're feeling, doing, thinking or intentionally not thinking. Twitter lets us be sincere, drunk, funny, passive, aggressive, or whatever else we feel like. To me that's the point of web 2.0, to let us do whatever we please in the safe confines of a 1920 x 1090 monitor.

The corollary of my web 2.0 theory must be that for everything we can post because we're free to do so, we are also bound by the fact that anyone else can read what we posted free from context, free from any actual emotion (no, emoticons DON'T count) and it's easy to take things out of context. I suppose it could be argued that within the generation that created such a culture this should be understood but I know that too many people take facebook statements and tweets as fact, and not with the pinch of salt they are intended.

This, rather obviously, can be contentious. I started out with an Urban dictionary definition for "Dooced", named after a popular American blogger who said the wrong thing too publicly, too loudly, and without enough privacy and was fired from her job. It's somewhat a groundbreaking case not because she lost her job for publishing something the firm wanted to keep private, but because she is the most high profile blogger to have done so. The painful irony was the mass of negative publicity that her former employee gathered out of it. Ranting about work, exaggerating for comic effect, and venting after a bad day are pretty common occurrences the world over - but firing her for it resulted in the company's identity being properly revealed and a lot of information about exactly how she lost her job to be widely spread.

The problem comes down to a combination of free speech, libel, and company policy. Free speech protects what we say, libel protects the third party from written words meant to harm, and company policy messes the whole world up. Legally the UK faces a situation that blogs and forums do not face libel law in the same way as a newspaper - the writing of blogs is more akin to publishing 'honestly held personal opinion' rather than a libelous claim (Smith v ADVFN Plc and others [2008]).

The issue comes when companies tie their employees in under excessive policy. No business wishes to have harm done to it's public opinion by some jerk sat behind a keyboard, and you would be hard pushed to find someone that could argue that's fair for that to be allowed, but does that mean that a legitimate opinion cannot be expressed? I am willing to write here that I think LG's warranty policy is the best available in the UK, and they'd be happy to hear that, even if I was an employee. But what if I write that I found the warranty process of Bib's TVs * to be horrendous, and that we should all steer clear. Does that instantly become defamation of Bib's TVs and cause for legal action? No, that's a legitimate opinion about a business. If I worked for them, however, and wrote how I wouldn't risk buying from them because of this I'm putting myself at risk for damaging their reputation.

There needs to be a look at this on a national level. I never want to lose my job for over-disclosure or for stating an honestly felt opinion, and no company wants to fire a member of staff because they threatened the company's reputation, which seems fair enough. I just don't think that companies should be able to push their staff off the edge for what as far as British Law is concerned is free speech. The managers who fire and punish for opinions are only going to bring themselves more negative publicity, especially on the web and we all know how damaging that can be.

*It was Bob's, but that's a real company, and I wouldn't want to get sued over this blog would I!