On cynics and sceptics

The difference between a conspiracy theorist and a cock-up theorist roughly accords to that between a cynic and a sceptic. Given the nature of people and the complexity of what we attempt and like to think we can control, I think scepticism is both a more realistic and a kinder starting point for looking at our peers and what they - and we ourselves - get up to. We should therefore be sceptics not cynics, at least at first, and be more tolerant towards people than we are.

The line between scepticism and cynicism is crossed when we find those who mould human error to ignoble purpose. It's these people we should worry about, not those who we think were capable of planning things all along.

I hope some of the more honest journalists at The News of the World not only share this opinion - or something like it - but will express it too, assuming they haven't been bought off already.

Follow my 4-step formula for making YOU richer!

Now pay attention. It's really very simple:

1. Gamble with a lot of other people's money
2. Use more of their and others' money to make up the losses
3. Pay even more of that money to the people who lost the money in the first place
4. Sack a lot of the people who didn't, and are now paying those who did

Lloyds Bank and the British Government are prepared to trust me: are YOU?

On the Dowlers

Without ignoring their pain, the power of which I can't begin to feel, or speaking about the court room ordeal that must have added to it, was it right for the Dowler family's understandably vengeful comments about Levi Bellfield to be broadcast so widely and enthusiastically?

Playing over and over again their request that Bellfield be treated as brutally as their murdered daughter - comments that would surely be portrayed as incitement if the context were different, for there are many people inside who will happily do just that - could equally make the media complicit in anything that does happen to him, were we so inclined to view it.

I can't blame the Dowlers for having such thoughts, although I hope they will be able to moderate them over time. True, they expressed them in front of the media, so should have known (and have been advised) what would happen with their words, but they weren't entirely responsible for the rest of us knowing about them. It's a tricky one, self-censorship.

On a loosely connected subject, can we have a stop to police spokesmen and -women standing outside court houses condemning those who have been found guilty? Their job is to catch offenders, not to discourse on how evil they are.

On Father's Day

Father's Day is a marketing ploy from which only orphans and bastards are safe. Fortunately for my wallet I'm both.

Support International Taking Things Literally Day!

I have diagnosed myself with Asperger's Syndrome following a work training course at which I was informed that "you are the best authority on you". After some thought, I take this to mean that I am better qualified than the scores of professionals who have scratched their heads on my account over the decades, so Asperger's Syndrome it is.

Among other things, people with Asperger's tend to take things literally and often act accordingly. To be honest I was quite confused in the training: when I read the statement quoted above I wondered who "you" was (just one of you or all of you?), but when someone read it to me it made perfect sense. I think I've got it now. By the way: for "you" please read respectively "I" and "me", because, as well as being the best authority on me, I've decided that I'm also the best authority on "you" and I challenge you to do a damned thing about it.

Anyway, at that course I saw the light (it was hanging from the ceiling); I felt free at last (of cares, not of charge; I have my price); I dropped everything and got a grip of myself in front of everyone right there in that room (so the old fearful dream had come true after all!). No longer a bundle of neuroses, I decided to become a bundle of diagnoses, with Asperger's Syndrome just one of them.

Actually, I have prior experience of Asperger's Syndrome, acquired at some personal cost a few years back while driving a 16-stone rugby player to training. I'd foolishly exclaimed "F*ck me!" after another driver had failed to signal left before turning. More recently I was myself arrested for indecent exposure after someone drove into the back of me outside a car mechanic's garage which had a sign reading "Brake and Clutch Parts". And, as you'd have read in an earlier posting on this Blog - except that I have evidence that no one has ever read it - I'm bothered by road signs outside retirement homes that read "Danger, Old People", as if Alzheimer's were catching or they'd hollowed out their walking sticks as blow pipes and lie in wait among the rhodedendrons. Finally, we all know the old joke that illustrates why we with Asperger's get away with criminal behaviour less often than the rest of you:
Angry child: "I hate Daddy's guts!"
Aspergic mother: "Leave them on the side of the plate then."
Oops!

Now as it happens there's already an International Asperger's Day in February each year. But taking things literally is only one aspect of the condition, and I have a further point to make. I want society to put what it sees as my disability to good use in cleaning itself up a bit, semantically speaking. I want nothing less than to restore meaning to expression before - in a world where we are all the best authority on everything - that vital link just doesn't really matter any more.

So I thought taking things literally could do with a day of its own as a kind of awareness raising exercise. And like all awareness raising exercises, which I am told are ten a penny although I have yet to find a shop that stocks them at any price, I don't feel bound by any particularly rigorous ethical protocols in doing so. I therefore want to start an International Taking Things Literally Day. Today, if you don't mind.

What does it require? Well, International Taking Things Literally Day is really very simple: On this day, whatever we all do or say must be a response to the literal meaning of what is communicated to us, verbally or in writing.

Here I should note that, in the interests of Health and Safety as well as what it has so comprehensively superseded, common sense, people aren't necessarily required to act upon what they hear or read. For example, if someone expresses surprise at something you say during a conversation, you won't have to throw stones at them or propinquitous corvids, but you will need to respond as if they'd requested it. So you might challenge the wisdom or effects of such actions, or check whether the magpie is a protected species, or ask whether other missiles would be acceptable if no stones are to hand, or whether your interlocutor is happy to sign a disclaimer of some kind in the presence of legal counsel before you set about them in the manner they have specified.

With this in mind, how, then, would you respond to the following 8 statements on this day? (I realise that the Germans among you will find this childishly easy but, as with everything else, please indulge the rest of us while we try to catch up with you.)

1. (while gossiping, and upon passing on an allegation regarding a pregnant goat, an egg whisk and a well-known Manchester United footballer) - "Stone the crows!"
2. (on holiday on the Sussex coast) - "Drop the kids off at Beachy Head and I'll pick them up later."
3. (at the street market) - "Shall we say £15 the pair, Guv?"
4. (in your boss's office for your annual appraisal, the morning after the firm's Christmas party) - "Now look, Simpson, you're going to have to pull your finger out and really get stuck in."
5. (over coffee and brandy at an expensive restaurant) - "Darling, I'd love to but I've got a headache tonight."
6. (on tapping an unsuspecting itinerant on the shoulder on a dark and foggy night) - "Holy Jesus!" (Thank you to J.P. Donleavy's The Onion Eaters for this one.)
7. (on being spotted by a policeman upon one of the towers of Clifton suspension bridge) - "Come down off there this instant!"
8. (at a cashpoint with a friend just before closing time on a Friday night) - "Damn thing's empty and I need money quick - can I touch you for £50?"

Or was it Dyspraxia? These diagnoses can be so - elusive.

I'll say this for al-Qaeda, mind ...

On the day that al-Qaeda, an organisation that has sworn to destroy the infidel West through murdering and spreading fear among innocents, appointed Ayman al-Zawahiri its new leader, the BBC interrupted a report on the subject during its main TV news bulletin to go live to the USA to broadcast the resignation speech of a Congressman who had posted saucy pictures of himself on the internet.

If anything might convince me that these funny, hairy foreign johnnies might have a point after all about our decadence, it's that our flagship broadcaster should have editorial priorities like that. Even if the Congressman's name was Wiener.

Lines composed upon The End Of The World

There was once a small planet in space
Where there lived a most self-centred race
That believed all would end
In a bang last weekend
And some cleared out their diaries in case.

Good Sir Isaac I find less despairing -
He considered the Earth more hard-wearing
And that it would endure
At least forty years more
But by then I'll be far beyond caring.

Now the point at which quack theologians
Depart from the best geologians
Is when God calls their bluff
They go off in a huff
And so rarely make good apologians.

So I think we are wise to conclude
That if Nature's to be well construed
Good empirical science
More deserves our reliance
And zealots are better eschewed.

But likewise, regarding the Soul,
I'd like Science itself to patrol
And have far less to say
In a scholarly way
About things it can't know or control.