Intersexual Olympiad

Transsexuals will be allowed to compete in the Athens Olympics, according to this recent article in Le Monde. Hormone treatment will no longer be tantamount to doping and even though testosterone-charged women might have an advantage over some female competitors in the power events, tests to determine sex will not take place.
Athletes who have changed sex before puberty will be allowed to compete freely, while those who've had a sex change post puberty will be considered on a case by case basis. All formerly male competitors in female events must have had their testicles removed, be recognised legally as female in their own countries and have been receiving hormone therapy for at least two years. As yet no transsexual athlete has come forward to participate under these conditions.
Interestingly, Le Monde reckons that when gender testing was first introduced in the 1960s, around 60% of women's world records were held by "intersexual" athletes.

Straight Outta Shoreditch

A little over a week ago, I discovered that the company I work for had been bought by another, which it seems had been acquired by another, which in turn had merged with another. What does this mean for we employees of a thirty strong privately owned Shoreditch agency, suddenly thrust into the pan-European publicly listed limelight? It means we're moving to Clerkenwell.
For those of you who don't know London, this represents a step away from the inverted snobbery of artiness imposing itself on urban poverty to a more salubrious world twixt media West End and commercial City. A change in tone for the company and de facto for me.
My attitude is resolutely wait and see, greatly aided by the general haze: no one seems sure about anything, even the current company name. Who knows if there's a plan for the new organizational structure, how we'll transfer work or even where we're going to sit.
Our bosses tell us that everything will remain the same (contracts, roles, teams) but are unclear over how to reconcile this continuity with their claim that this is the greatest career opportunity any of us could have in our industry in the UK. How can everything continue with no changes and simultaneously offer us so much opportunity?
As Lisa Simpson reminds us, "opportunity" in Chinese is the same word as "crisis".

Resumption

My blog has been silent over the last ten days because of the death of my father-in-law. Another cancer sufferer. It might be appropriate to relate something poignant, but my attempt to do would likely be facile or self-indulgent, so I remain silent on this though the blog resumes.

Words of power, words of lurve...

Having come across a hard-hitting article in that bastion of journalistic probity, the Evening Standard recently, I recounted to a twenty-something colleague over lunch yesterday how there's a disproportionate ratio of single women to men in central London; something like 5:4. Finding a single straight guy was tough, according to the article, though I was somewhat cynical about how people were trying to find him.
Lo! that evening I behold my colleague in the clutches of another, pressed back against the wall of a bar in new-media-land. My acerbic observations wield unanticipated power...

Cyber-loafing

Is my general demotivation due to my body having very little pancreas, so that my hormones and blood sugar levels are up the spout, or just to being bored of same old?

Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging

I'm an ENTJ accoding to a neo-Jungian pyschometric profiling technique. While the 3% of the population to which I belong live outside traditional boundaries and need to think ahead of the curve, I can't help but feel that it makes me sound like an utter wanker.

The heat is on

Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 over the weekend and was left with mixed feelings. There are so many shameful aspects about how the Bush administration led the U.S. and others to war that it was difficult for Moore to make a strong thesis for the film: it seemed to jump around a bit and not come to a strong conclusion. Nevertheless, Moore lets the people most affected do most of the talking: the soldiers, their families and the Bush administration. While we've seen or heard most of this stuff before, it's still impressive to learn how profit drove the invasion of Afghanistan, or see Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice deny categorically that Iraq had WMD in 2001, then state exactly the opposite two years later. Yet the film lets Blair gets off scot-free, while even Cheney and Rumsfeld get away with token rebukes.
The over-riding impression the film left me with is that if you're poor, no one will stand up for you. The poor bomb those even poorer than themselves to escape their own destitution; yet when they are disenfranchised, no one will take up their cause. Then when the rich need them, the poor defend them. Who said Marxism was discredited?

Race for life

Helen ran 5 kilometres in about 35 minutes on Sunday, along with 7,000 other women in Blackheath. These were all people who knew a cancer sufferer and had decided to do something about it by raising money for Cancer Research UK. For someone like me, it was amazing to see that so many people cared; and to see so many people achieve their target was excellent. Helen could barely jog for a minute when she started eight weeks ago, but with some support from her friend Clare who came up from Brighton to run with her, they more than deserved their medals.

Cool...

There are some pretty impressive ice cream flavours on offer in Japan. Just one cornetto of whale, perhaps with a touch of raw horseflesh...

Eastern blocks

Rothko urged us not to think of the lines in his paintings as a division between two blocks of a similar colour, but rather as a join between these masses. This may be what appeals to me so much about central Asia, apparently caught between Europe, Arabia, India and China, but really the bond between them all, sewing them together with a strand of silk. I long to see Samarkand, Kashgar, Isfahan without knowing anything about them. But Rajastan, St. Petersburg, Jordan, Guatemala all need to be seen too; those blocks of colour are waiting for me!

A cut above the rest?

Here's a gadget I view with some circumspection. While the SmartKlamp is neither a gadget I might have made use of nor intend to, I'm sure it's something that will be favoured by incisive Rabbis.

Virtuous wealth

I've been reading some of Plutarch's Lives on and off recently...
Plutarch tells us that Lycurgus, who established systems of law and economy in ancient Sparta, believed that the happiness of a man consists in the exercise of virtue and not in power or wealth. The biographer describes the Spartan lifestyle that Lycurgus instituted (redistribution of wealth, meritocracy over plutocracy, communal eating and working for the good of the state; this must surely have influenced Marx and Engels) but makes little mention of Sparta's serendipitous use of helots, state-owned slaves who allowed citizens to pursue virtue without needing to worry about chores; this must have influenced Stalin.
Anyway it makes me wonder, if happiness cannot be achieved through power or wealth but only through virtue, does that make virtue and wealth mutually exclusive? While Lycurgus redistributed wealth to correct Spartan morals, the economy had been based on inheritance of land rather than entrepreneurship. But in a capitalist free-trade economy if you give others what they want, you could plausibly become virtuous and wealthy at the same time: this would constitute a Thatcherite beatification of Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates.
Of course, these two are a long way from sainthood, given the way Gates treats his competitors and Murdoch controls information to further his own political ends. And if they were to give up some of their wealth to fund clean water, vaccination and literacy their virtue would be even greater; but that is true for all of us. So at what point does our wealth make us unvirtuous and therefore unhappy? And at what point does our poverty make us virtuous and therefore happy? Is there a practical way for us to become happy without giving up our comforts? Or is that just called income tax?

Smacks of inappropriateness

The bill that proposes smacking be banned or partially banned depending on what's enforceable misses the point. Why is it that legislators never ask themselves questions? Why do they think they need to protect children against smacking from their parents? Why do they think that people who look after other peoples' children don't need to be allowed to smack? If the government focussed on developing parenting skills then parents would not need to hurl abuse at their children, beat them, swear at them or treat them in the otherwise shabby manner that I see every day in south-east London. If their parents spoke to them in a way that they expect to be spoken to -- if they showed any care for their children whatsoever -- then we wouldn't get conservatives complaining about how those children should be beaten and liberals complaining about the abuse they're suffering. Evidence of physical abuse can still lead to prosecution without this new bill, but the underlying problem won't be addressed.

The message to Southwark Council

It's like a jungle sometimes: it makes me wonder from how I keep from going under. Broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs, you know they just don't care. I can't take the smell, can't take the noise, got no money to move out; I guess I've got no choice. Scooters out the front, wasters out the back, chavs swear at kids in the upstairs flat. I tried to get it fixed but couldn't get far coz the neighbourhood officer's a useless tart.

Unreconstructed advertising

Google runs Blogger.com, so the banners at the top of my blog's web pages are based on what Google thinks is relevant content.
Unfortunately, Google has no concept of irony. Hence you'll find related searches for Halliburton and Francesco Totti. But some of my favourites (to compound Google's sense that its assessment of my Blog is accurate) are links to the Iraq Reconstruction Contract Database, Iraq Revenue Watch, and undoubtedly: Deployed to Iraq? Check your Life Insurance with NAAFI Financial.

Against all odds

Their record before the tournament was impressive, but I didn't expect them to get so far; they had a foreign manager with a track record of success, but still I doubted them; beat teams they'd never beaten before along the way, but I still doubted they'd get to the final; the Portuguese have really impressed.
And the Greeks have done all right too. Beaten the favourites (France) and the best team there (Czech Republic). All right, it's with football that makes George Graham look adventurous, but it's the result that counts.

A whisker away

I grew a moustache last night. Ok, so I didn't grow it last night, but I shaved the rest of my unkempt face and kept the moustache just to see how it would go.
The effect was not entirely the desired one. Rather than the anticipated George Harrison-esque appearance, I bore a closer resemblance to a Belgian paedophile.
Still, you've got to experiment, if only to blog about it.

A nation state with no domain

Iraq may have regained its independence -- albeit under occupying powers -- and Saddam is about to stand trial, but its virtual identity is still under Texan corporate control. InfoCom controls the .iq domain, and Iraq has asked for it to be restored.