Pastry related thoughts

The Lithuanian lady that works in the pasty shop gave me a free pasty once. I sneezed a polite 'thank-you' (the Lithuanian for 'thank-you' is pronounced 'achoom') and went about my day - my inner being warmed by that simple act of human kindness (and delicious peppery skirt steak folded in shortcrust pastry). Whenever I felt pessimistic about human nature, I would think back to that day and wonder if I'd ever see such a purely altruistic act again.

That was four years ago. A few weeks ago, I went into Louis's Deli on St Giles street to order a sausage roll to eat at work during a Tuesday day shift...

(You may be wondering why I was in Louis's when I walk right past the Upper Crust bakery on my way to work. The Upper Crust sausage roll is a travesty in my opinion. Twice the length and half the price of his cousin at Louis's he may be. But the rusk to meat ratio is way too high and they always leave me with a vague sense of disappointment and mild nausea. I would always recommend making the trip over the bridge to Louis's if you have the time and, if you don't have the time, Upper Crust do a passable date and chocolate flapjack. Because it is covered in chocolate the staff always warn you that it contains dates. A policy that I like to assume was brought in because so many were returned: "Ugh! Someone's put dried fruit in my chocolate-covered golden syrup oat bar!")

...and the servitor announced that she had given me two for the price of one because that day's batch were burnt on the underside.

There's bound to be a moral in this somewhere. Memories bake where pastry flakes or something. I'm not terribly good at morals.

Some Metaphysics

Last week I wrote a semi-political post that expressed the desire to punish weapons-manufacturers with eternal torment in the Ninth Circle of Hell. Among the responses was this enquiry from my old friend, boss and one-time flatmate (she let me doss on her sofa for three weeks way back in the summer of 1999) Grainne:

Since when do you believe in hell?

I don't believe in Hell. I was drawing on a rich cultural tradition of post-death reward and punishment common to many mythologies (not universal however or at least not included in my favourite list on the internet Donald E. Brown's list of human universals) to make clear my disapproval of the moneygoround which is the world of arms dealers, Western governments and their client states.

I hope that's cleared that up. It may surprise some of you that despite not believing in hell, heaven, ghosts, God, elfs, goblins or the Easter Bunny, I do have some quite out-there metaphysical beliefs that hitherto I have kept more or less to myself. Amazingly, I now have a regular readership to share them with.

I think numbers (even the imaginary ones) are real. I think Mathematical truths are discovered not invented. I think that one plus one would equal two even if there was no human mind to think it. I think that one plus one would equal two even if there was no Universe in which a mind capable of thinking it could evolve. In fact, I think that one plus one would equal two even if there was no Universe at all.

I struggle with these beliefs and have not arrived at them arbitrarily. My beliefs stem from a choice: Either mathematics is embedded in the Universe (i.e. in the minds and cultural memory of one species of primate living at the bottom of a gravity well orbiting one out of a trillion stars in one out of a trillion galaxies) or the Universe is embedded in mathematics and anything capable of counting and reasoning will reach the same conclusions. I find the former proposition less elegant than the latter although I admit that this an aesthetic rather than a purely logical choice.

Next week: Why I would be a Cartesian mind/body dualist if only there was more evidence for the body.     

Circle #Nine

According to Dante's Inferno, the Ninth circle of hell is a frozen lake populated by the perpetrators of history's great betrayals: Cain, Brutus and Judas (and a bunch of medieval Italians we've never heard of, this is Dante after all) number among those who suffer there. Their bodies twisted into painful contortions with just their heads (or sometimes just their faces) poking out.

If I was in charge of hell, this is the place I would reserve for arms manufacturers and their child-murdering collaborators in our government.

You may wonder why I am mixing a metaphor cocktail of warm Vitriol and easy target. Especially in August, when a more typical contribution might include a sonnet about lying on my back watching the Perseids wishing I didn't have work tomorrow.

But I've been reading about the bombings in Gaza so I will save the sonnets and the Perseids and the lying on my back wishing I didn't have work tomorrow themes for another day and add my small voice to the condemnation of the Israeli government's disproportionate slaughter of the Palestinians living in Gaza.

But that is not enough. It is our own complicity in the murder that makes me really upset. Some of those bombs have 'made in Britain' stamped on the side.

And I have not been put in charge of hell. But if I was, those who love money so much that they have contrived a complex system whereby they are handsomely rewarded for the production of destruction, agony and misery would be first in line for the lake of ice.

Flower Grower

Believe it or not, sometimes when I sit down to do one of these, I have no idea what I am going to write about. Other times, I think I am going to write an amusing, informing and above all authoritative account of why it's cool to be an empirical Rationalist, but uncool to be a rational Empiricist and out comes a poem about flowers:

On the flower farm

Her ungloved hands are bloody from the thorns
Of a thousand roses picked
One February morning.

In the drought, she once walked many miles
To fetch water with her daughter
Who was always smiling.

On the flower farm the water flows,
Makes the sandy soil seem dark and rich,
Makes a woman wonder why
We eat so many roses in the West.

Pernickety about Piketty

In preparation for this weekend's stag do in Brussels, I've been reading Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. I don't want to find myself blind-drunk in a nightclub chatting to some Eurocrat and be unable to remember whether return on capital (r) is greater than economic growth (g) or the other way round. How embarrassing would that be?

So that I don't get confused, I have invented the handy mnemonic "rum is better than gin". I imagine this will soon be adopted by economics teachers the world over. 

Piketty's main argument is that the rich get richer because having money earns you more money than merely working. This has been the case throughout the history of modern capitalism except for a brief blip during the Twentieth Century when the wealthy nations felt guilty about all the suffering they had caused during the two World Wars and briefly introduced some laws that redistributed wealth. Since the 1970s things have been returning to the status quo - money goes to money and screw the poor.

This is all explained in the introduction and then he presents several hundred pages of evidence. This is remarkable because it is something that no economist has ever thought to do before (even all the raw data is available online). Smith, Marx and Keynes all wrote enormous tracts on political economy with no evidence whatsoever. (And don't get me started on the Marginalists and their neoliberal apologist successors). Some of the evidence has been disputed by the Financial Times, but nothing which affects the central premise.

Spoiler Alert! The following paragraph contains an equitable solution for the future of humanity: 

Piketty concludes that the only way to change things is to tax the wealthy. Actually take their money and spend it on things that benefit everybody.

And that is the message I will be taking to Brussels... on a stag do... during the World Cup... I'm sure everybody will be hanging on my every word.

  

  

Proverbially speaking

A coffee shop has recently opened up next door to the pub I work in. This is great news because now when someone asks for a coffee, I can give them my best withering look that says "Really? You want to pay a pound for a cup of Nescafe instant in a stained mug when there is a coffee shop right next door serving the best flat white north of Haringey?" I have to communicate this sentiment using eyebrows only. If I said it out loud I would probably be sacked. 

The only downside of this coffee shop is that the owner insists on littering the pavement with blackboards bearing soul-destroyingly cheerful messages of hope, love and encouragement to buy coffee. "Think Big!" an A-board yells at me as I autopilot my hungover body back to the bar I left only eight hours previously to clear up the mess that I left only eight hours previously. As I fumble for the key to open another day's drudgery my peripheral vision is assaulted with meaningless chirpy aphorisms: "Only YOU control your life", "A journey of a thousand miles begins with just a single coffee", "Happiness is in YOUR hands". You get the idea. There are new ones every day, including the comically ill-situated one pictured.

*Not to be taken literally

 The grammatical and semantic oddness of "The best things in life are Coffee" deserves a blog-length deconstruction all of its own. Maybe I'll come back to it. 

But it has been a while since I brought up that old favourite of this blog: Donald E. Brown's list of Human Universals. This is the anthropologist's list of things that are either (in the weak interpretation) common in every human culture or (in the strong interpretation) universal to every human being. It's a fascinating read that I like to revisit whenever I need reminding that humans share a lot more in common than is commonly appreciated. Anyhow, way down the end of the list, 28th on the additions since 1989 addendum, is: "Proverbs and sayings in mutually contradictory forms" (An example from English would be: "too many cooks spoil the broth" and "many hands make light work").

What do I conclude from this? Not much and much. There is much that is contradictory in human behaviour. I suppose our proverbs would reflect that. I read this Anglo-Saxon one the other day and it seems as relevant today as when anonymously penned (or quilled or carved or whatever they did in those days) more than a millennium ago:

Man deþ swá hé byþ þonne hé mót swá hé wile 

Man does as he is when he does as he wishes

Or, as philologist Tom Shippey translates more coloquially: "You show what you are like when you can do what you like." It works on many levels. I like to read it as a moral lesson showing the worthlessness of the idle rich, but also as a reminder to myself to spend my free time productively. I have a day off today. Maybe I'll go for a coffee.  

  

Broccoli and (propositional) calculi

One of the good things about being alive is that life is forever affording you the opportunity to learn little lessons so that you can conduct the rest of it with less difficulty than you have previously experienced.

Take for example this simple (and I imagine, universal) rule: If you have in your possession a Brassica and you don't have a specific meal planned that involves it, in three weeks time you will be dragging a plastic bag full of cauliflower sludge out of the fridge. This can be formulated using a fairly standard notation as (p & ¬q --> ¬p).

Human brains are brilliant at rearranging such logical formulations and I expect you will quickly notice that (¬p v q) follows and so next time you're browsing the broccoli aisle you can think to yourself: Either don't buy it or make a plan to use it now. 

And that is the lesson that I had intended to implement in the coming weeks. Except then I had to buy a sweetheart cabbage today because otherwise my shopping would have consisted of a bottle of wine and a pack of butter and I don't want to be judged by the staff in Lidl. Although, I think they might have judged me because I was the only person who wasn't buying or wearing something with the St George's cross emblazoned on it.