yonmei

01:38 pm: Water, water, everywhere
I don't know any of my neighbour's phone numbers.

(Why would I? I never phone them!)

According to Scottish Water, who rang me back quite promptly, there are no other reports of outages in my area, suggesting it's a plumbing problem, and they say that the most likely cause of the outage is someone else having plumbing work done and the plumber turning off the wrong water supply from the street.

This sounds appallingly likely, and of course means zero cost to me in fixing it, but I say "appalling" because, well: the only way of finding out is to go ask all my neighbours. And there's no point doing that till post-work time.

...and at that point, there will be no getting a plumber out till tomorrow, probably, which means another evening without the capacity to make bread or soup (unless I buy beer), to shower (unless I go to the gym) or to use a flush toilet (without walking at least half a mile).

This applies still more so if no one has had plumbing work done and I just have to call a damn plumber and find out what the problem is.

I don't have time for this. I just want my water back.

(Adding to the catalogue of problems, because of the way my heating system works, I am afraid to turn the central heating system on - I certainly don't want the boiler to heat up the empty hot water tank.)




Tags: venting, water

08:15 am: I have no water
And it's raining, which is especially ironic.

To be precise: no water is coming out of the mains tap. I have just contacted Scottish Water to ask them "the hell?" since I heard nothing about this.

I cannot wash. I can probably flush the toilet once, so, um, I'm saving that up for when I really, really need to. (TMI. Sorry.) I have a couple of bottles of water which is what the cats are drinking and I am washing my hands and brushing my teeth with.

I cannot make bread. That needs water. I cannot make tea. I cannot make coffee. I cannot make soup! (Well, I could buy beer and use that for stock. Hm.) I can't do the washing up!

The water was gone when I left for work yesterday (it was fine as of the previous night) but I thought it was probably just a less-than-one-day outage of the kind that happens sometimes when you live on an old street and other people's plumbing problems become your own.






Tags: venting, water

09:36 am: "My job as an artist is to make you squirm"
Via dragovianknight, E. Bear writes:

My job as an artist is to tell you what I see, not what I wish I saw. My job is to tell as much of the truth about the world as my tiny flawed inadequate little brain and art can encompass. And the truth--even the tiny, fragmentary, self-contradictory truths that are all I have to offer--the truth will make you squirm.

From Elizabeth Bear, Chapter 3, Blood and Iron:

( cut for length )

This is enough to make me squirm, but not because it's "the truth": it makes me squirm because it's embarrassingly untrue. If it's what Elizabeth Bear "sees", she was at the movies or watching TV when she "saw" it - the romantic depiction of "the young Master returning home to be greeted by the middle-aged female servant". (It also makes me sure, and sad, that Bear has never been a P. G. Wodehouse fan: even Bertie Wooster understood that the phrase "young Master" can be employed only for comic or teasing effect.)

Later in this essay asserting what kind of Artist she is, Bear says:

If you want somebody to tell you what you want to hear, to hew to a party line, or to spread some kind of gospel, you probably want some other kind of artist. If you want somebody to proselytize an ideology, you definitely want some other kind of artist.

I am not here to comfort you.

Well, Blood and Iron is certainly not comforting - it's irritating and discomfiting to realise that there are still people in the world who think that it's appropriate to pull out "Stout grey-haired McCliche" when they think need arises, complete with obsequious dialogue. (Unless, later in the novel, we discover part of being a werewolf is keeping the local village in terrified submission, and the reason for Morag's obsequiousness was that she knew if she failed to address Keith as "young Master" or if he complained about her service, villagers would die. That doesn't quite make sense either with the way she behaves, but maybe she's suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.)

But Bear's notion that in promoting this kind of character, depicting this kind of relationship, she is not "hewing to a party line", just tells me: she's never tried to think politically about what she writes. About how, for example, a pack of incoming werewolves who buy and restore a Scottish 16th-century manor house near a village, and set about raising cattle and sheep, would fit in with the community. (Are they Catholic werewolves or Protestant werewolves? If Protestants, are they Presbyterian or Episcopalian? If Presbyterian, which branch of the church have they followed?) How would the locals react to the new family at the big house? (And they could be "the new family" for fifty years or more...) If Bear thinks that they could simply move in and be princes of the fiefdom without any backtalk from the locals, she is proselytising an ideology - a very conservative, very comforting kind of ideology to a certain kind of person - the sort of person who believes absolutely in the rightness of the class system, in everyone "knowing their place", and the lower orders showing proper respect to the landowner.

That isn't the kind of artist I want. But it is the kind of artist who would write Morag that way and never notice that she had her own thoughts about Eoghan and Keith MacNeill.

(See also: What is a writer's job? at feministsf.)



Tags: books are what i read, evil american politics, racefail 09, scottish politics, venting

11:30 am: I Officially Hate Adobe
Also, people who make use of Flash when they don't have to. Which, if you ask me, they never do.

I've given up on trying not to have Flash installed on my computer, because so many websites use it for every little damn thing. Even the site stats Wordpress provides come with pretty graphs in Flash.

Well. New install of Firefox needed for my work computer, okay: done. New install of Flash needed for my work computer *sigh* Okay, will do...

...can't. Every time I try to install Flash, it comes up with an error message saying "No, you need Firefox". There is no means of telling it that I have Firefox, that the exe install file that is telling me smugly "no, you need Firefox" was downloaded using Firefox: it simply says "You need Firefox before I can install" and sits there, doing nowt. You can't report the error anywhere: you can't alter the install program: you just have to delete it and do without Flash.

There's nothing helpful about this on the Adobe site. Obviously, they don't have a support e-mail to contact: you can register and ask on the discussion boards from other users, but frankly I hate those: also, since I have Firefox, the problem must be that Adobe Flash is looking for a specific directory name, and it's probably still looking for Firefox v2 and I have v3, so the only solution is to wait until someone at Adobe realises, behind their wall of non-communication, that in the outside world people using Firefox v3 cannot install Flash.

Tags: computer disasters, just my life really, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, venting, wanting to fire people for being stupid

10:41 am: Snark is *not* a valid way to begin a discussion
(And I apologise to bethbethbeth and elke_tanzer for snarking on their journals, and hereby commit not to snark about OTW on any other OTWsquee posts on anyone else's journal...)

But nevertheless, I could wish that the reaction of OTWers to the point that if you are not on livejournal, you are excluded from OTW, was rather more constructive than blank denial.

If you do not have a livejournal, you cannot participate in the Organisation of Transformative Works. It's set up that way. While this makes me feel snarky whenever I see someone squeeing about OTW, for a number of reasons including the fact that just about the last thing fandom needs is yet another organisation exclusively for livejournal fans, what makes me really cranky is that OTW fans will not acknowledge that their organisation is exclusively for livejournal fans.

Signed,

Cranky Platypus.

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, fannish snark, i write fanfic, let's all be outcasts together, venting

10:41 pm: Ugh.
( More Easyjet venting )

Tags: buying things i don't need, easyjet are flying pigs, gah, howls of rage, travel, venting

01:44 pm: Easyjet: Pigs with wings
Easyjet always offers three days when you book: the day you said you wanted to travel and a day either side, so that you can opt for a cheaper price, if there is one.

We wanted to fly out on the 7th, so I searched on the 7th. Options for 6th and 8th came up, but I paid not too much attention to them (they weren't substantially cheaper or more expensive). Had discussion with Ajay about when to fly back. Opted for Friday.

More discussion. Stuck with Friday. Paid.

Somehow, Tuesday 6th got booked.

I'm willing to assume that somehow I changed it, though not intentionally: I don't recall doing anything to the dates of the flight out. First I noticed that we were now on the 6th was when the final confirmation page arrived, which said in large unfriendly letters TUESDAY 6th MAY.

No means of changing it immediately were offered. No contact phone number showed up when I clicked on "Contact Us". I tried to search on "what happens if a mistake was made in your booking" and got nowhere. If your question is not answered, they said, e-mail and we'll respond within 24 hours.

So I e-mailed. This would have been close to 1am Thursday morning, or Wednesday night, whichever way you count it. Easyjet had my landline, my mobile number, and my e-mail address.

When no one had tried to contact me by e-mail or mobile (cannot say for landline, but if they did ring, they left no message) I called Easyjet, using my google-fu to find a list of phone numbers via Cheapflights, which also provided instructions on how to get through to an actual human operator. Cost of call, 10p a minute. Length of call, about 20 minutes - I was left on hold twice, once for about 5 minutes. Operator, very pleasantly, tried to convince me that Easyjet's method of concealing their phone number from customers was actually very helpful: what you do, she said, is go to the search box which appears on the bottom of the page or on the Contact Us page and type in the keyword telephone. Then a page with telephone contact details appears. I cannot say I find this explanation particularly convincing: however, FWIW, I know now.

But, she said, you're saying a mistake was made when you booked. You e-mailed us, and we'd expect you to phone us right away if something like that happened. (See discussion about how Easyjet conceals its phone number.) It says on your record page that someone tried to contact you. (I assured her that no one had.) It shouldn't say anyone will contact you within 24 hours, because we're very busy right now. Then she put me on hold - having assured me that she did believe me when I said I had no reason to change from the default day to the day previous - and spoke to her supervisor (this was the five minute hold, 50p). No, her supervisor said, they wouldn't waive the change-of-flight charges: £17.50 per passenger, £35 in all. (Nicely calculated: I checked. It is just cheaper to pay these swingeing charges than it is to book another flight.) No, she said, when I asked, they wouldn't even reduce the change-of-flight charges by half. (Another hold, though a shorter one.)

She was very apologetic and nice about it, but it's a useful reminder - since the last time something like this happened to me (that time it was BMI) that airlines regard customer service as something their customers provide to them. Be helpful to a customer booking 4 months in advance when the Easyjet website makes it easy for them to book the wrong date? Don't be silly: charge them £35. Respond within 24 hours to explain? Don't be silly: just add to the customer page that you have contacted them, and assume she won't be able to prove otherwise. Publish your telephone number on the website so that when someone in a hurry clicks on Contact Us they find it? Don't be silly: make sure it's as difficult as possible to find, so that a customer can be told "you should have contacted us sooner, by phone - the information was available!" Sure. In best Beware of the Leopard style, it was available. Easyjet easyjet easyjet bastards.

(BMI used to run an early morning flight Heathrow to Edinburgh. If you wanted a vegetarian breakfast, it had to be booked 48 hours in advance, and if another vegetarian on the flight who hadn't booked a vegie breakfast claimed yours because they were sitting a few rows ahead of you, that was just too bad: the BMI flight attendant was not allowed to apologize. (After a while I just used to get on the plane and go to sleep: regard it as a non-food flight, which effectively it was if you didn't eat bacon.) Then there was the American airline that didn't provide enough drinking water to the passengers on a transAtlantic flight: I thought I was coming down with something by the time I landed in Boston, being unfamiliar with the symptoms of dehydration, but as soon as I'd had a drink I was fine. Then... Oh well. To airlines, we're crops for harvesting, not customers. Bah. And the worst of it is: I can see I really have no option other than to swallow the fees.)

Tags: buying things i don't need, easyjet are flying pigs, gah, howls of rage, travel, venting

08:46 pm: Justice is not achieved with e-petitions
Hwaet! Give ear to!

This afternoon a friend sent to my work address (I think hoping I might use my work resources to publicise it) an e-petition that begins:

Outrage in South Africa

Last week a 3 year old girl in South Africa was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man responsible was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on.

The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that there's a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. (Note: that part is perfectly damnably true.)

The younger the virgin, the more potent the cure. This has led to an epidemic of rapes by infected males, with the correspondent infection of innocent kids. Many have died in these cruel rapes. Recently in Cape Town , a 9-month-old baby was raped by 6 men. Please think about that for a moment. The child abuse situation is now reaching catastrophic proportions and if we don't do something, then who will? Kindly add your name to the bottom of the list and please pass this on to as many people as you know.

If you are signature no.: 1000 - please forward the mail-list to c h i l d p r o t e c t p c a @ s a p s . o r g . z a

There are 643 names on the copy that reached me, beginning with a name in Australia.

When this e-mail arrived, I glanced it over, and thought my usual think: E-petitions are no good, why do people keep forwarding them? and a less-usual think, because I was at work: I should look this up and see if I can publicise it, or if I can't, suggest better ways to the friend who sent it to me. A Facebook group, I thought. Something.

This specific kind of petition, where the author asks you to add your name and forward it to "everyone you know" is a kind of viral meme. It can be worthwhile in drawing attention to a specific issue (as with the Afghan women petition of a few years ago), but actually regarding it as a petition to be sent to an e-mail address where "someone" will do something about it is pointless: an e-mail petition of this kind is regarded about as highly as a blank sheet of paper, and the influx of e-mails to the e-mail address given will, soon or late, mean that e-mail address has to be shut down due to overload.

This, however, is a more treacherous kind of petition; it's a hoax. As I found in five minutes googling, this is a known hoax that's been circulating on the Internet for at least eighteen months. The Child Protection Unit in South Africa is not being closed down: it's being expanded, restructured, and renamed the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit. (The e-mail address given is not a valid police address.)

There is a grain of awful truth in the e-mail.

The Virgin Cure belief isn't specific to South Africa - in fact, it may have come to southern Africa with European colonists in the 19th century:

The myth of the Virgin Cure has a rich and culturally diverse history stretching back to 16th century Europe, and more prominently to be found in 19th century Victorian England, where, in spite of the emphasis on morality, rectitude and family values, there existed a widespread belief, that sexual intercourse with a virgin was a cure for syphilis, gonorrhea, [and other STD's]. (HIV/AIDS, the stats, the virgin cure and infant rape)

The phenomenon of infant rape in South Africa is very real:

"In our culture, as a woman, you don't say no to a man. Sex is not open for discussion," [Rose Tamae, a survivor of gang rape] says.
"So they think they can do as they like.
"In a place like Orange Farm, where most people are unemployed, and the women have to go looking for work far away, often the children are left at home in the care of men, or strangers.
"They are vulnerable. In one case a little girl was being given food in return for sex, and she didn't want to go home empty-handed to her mother, who had Aids and was sick. " (BBC)

But though rape reporting to the police is on the rise, the actual figures of rape may not be, and may not be connected with the "Virgin Cure" phenomenon:

Dr Jewkes and two of her collaborators, Dr Lorna Martin (Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, University of Cape Town) and Ms Loveday Penn-Kekana (Centre for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand) believe other factors are to blame for these violent acts.
"The idea that having sex with a virgin cleanses you of AIDS does exist in South Africa and there have been reported cases of this as a motivating factor for child rape, but the predominant evidence suggests that this is infrequently the case," Dr Jewkes says. She quotes Mr Luke Lamprecht, the manager of the Teddy Bear Clinic in Johannesburg, which is the referral point for all child sex abuse cases in the metropolis. According to him, he has only seen one child rape case where the perpetrator believed the myth. This happened some 4 years ago - and the child's mother agreed that the HIV-positive man could rape her 4-year-old in exchange for cash.
"According to another report on child rape which investigated injury patterns, management and outcomes, there was a 1% sero-conversion rate.* This was, for most cases, in the absence of anti-retroviral therapy and therefore suggests that this myth is not an important cause of rape. If it had been, in view of the extensive injuries common in child rape, a higher rate of sero-conversion would be expected," says Dr Jewkes. (The 'virgin myth' and child rape in South Africa)

These are horrors. There are real things people can do: get involved with your local World AIDS Day event; donate to the AIDS Foundation of South Africa; read more about AIDS in Africa; support Rape Crisis NGOs in South Africa (the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust is one of the oldest and does work around the country as well as in Cape Town); if you live in the UK, you can support Community H. E. A. R. T, a UK charity that supports "Health Education And Reconstruction Training" in South Africa: if you live elsewhere, you can find a similar charity based in your country. These are useful things to do. Forwarding an e-mail petition isn't going to do a damn thing, ever, even when it's actually factually true.

(On the other hand, I wouldn't want to discourage you from e-mailing Pope Rat at benedictxvi@vatican.va, or ringing him at the Vatican Switchboard (+39.06.6982) or even writing to him at Vatican City (you will have to address the envelope "His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, 00120 Via del Pellegrino, Citta del Vaticano": I imagine envelopes sent to Pope Rat or That Nazi Bastard just get weeded out at the sorting office): and asking him why the Catholic Church is spending more resources to oppose condoms in Africa than it is on opposing the lie of the Virgin Cure.)

Tags: evil religious politics, feminism, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, venting

06:11 pm: Letter to Boots
( letter to Boots, unedited version )

( letter to Boots, edited version )

Tags: not dieting just losing weight, venting, writing complaining letters

12:00 pm: An Olympic campaign against copyright
A few years ago, a company claimed they'd trademarked the word Fandom and no one but they were allowed to use it. (The company went bankrupt not long afterwards, a lesson the IOC should learn.)

David Edger in the Guardian (via muninnhuginn) documents an even sillier claim: You can't use the O-word - the International Olympic Committee are claiming that they have the word "Olympic" copyrighted, and no one but them or those they designate are allowed to make use of it.

This raises stupidity to Olympic levels. Except for the fact that the IOC are clearly playing stupidity as professionals, to make money, rather than as amateurs in a glorious costly stupidity spree, I'd say the IOC would get Olympic golds for Olympic stupidity as they ran the Olympic Stupidity Games.

How many times can you use Olympic in a single post? Pass it on.

(Olympic Mind Games is the book the IOC are objecting to. Apparently "Olympics 2012" may be copyrighted too.)

Tags: olympic stupidity, olympics, stupid copyright claims, venting