Skyfail

Three o'clock and no sign of the engineer. John Paul Sartre said that three o'clock in the afternoon is either too late or too early for anything you want to do and I'm starting to agree. Agreeing with Sartre is not something I often find myself doing. Does this constitute an Existential crisis? Can 'does this constitute an Existential crisis?' even be considered a meaningful question? Such are the questions one is likely to ponder when deprived of Television for two days.

I secretly like the first couple of hours of waiting in the flat for someone to come and fix something. I find it a really good opportunity to do nothing productive. No point starting work on a project when Graham from Sky TV could ring the doorbell any minute.

Graham from Sky TV is visiting as the Sky box has stopped receiving a signal. To start with, Spike was probably the most concerned about it as at least Charlie and I can play scrabble or have an argument about whether or not a word is permitted in scrabble.  

After the first couple of hours of waiting, I start to feel that existential guilt that I haven't done anything except stare into the middle distance. That's when I pull myself together and ring Graham (who should have arrived between 12 and 2). Half an hour, he says. Plenty of time to bang out a blogpost. Not a proper one with links and photos. Just a self-referential piece of existentialism featuring an anthropomorphicised cactus. Outside, it's a cold spring day. Daffodils bloom. Life thrives.

Dreams of Naglfar

My obsession with non-Skaldic Old Norse verse continues apace. I am currently working my way through the Poetic Edda which opens with a terrifying prophecy of the end of the world:

"...the serpent churns the waves, the eagle shrieks in anticipation,
pale-beaked he tears the corpse, Naglfar breaks loose..."

Naglfar? I turn to the glossary. Naglfar is a ship made out of the fingernails of the dead. 

Just thought I'd share that image with you, so I'm not alone in my nightmares tonight. (I am assuming 90s cartoon Potsworth and Company is broadly correct in their metaphysics of dreaming.)

Marginally related interesting fact (and explicatory note for my American readers): Potsworth and Company was called Midnight Patrol: Adventures in the Dreamzone when originally broadcast in the United States, but the BBC insisted on changing the name because executives felt that it inappropriately suggested that children might be awake after Midnight.

Abandoned Valentine's poem #6

Better late than never...

Roses are any colour you like -
A complex semiotic game.
Violets are violet
(the clues in the name).
Daffodils are yellow: Wordsworth's "host",
A card is better than a Facebook post.

:)

Hammer Time

Six months into the tenancy of what we still call the 'new' flat and the pictures intended for the walls resolutely refuse to hang themselves. Spike seems indifferent to this, I don't think he minds bare walls. But, recently, Charlie said she will ask her father to do it next time he visits. Which basically gave me to the end of the month to buy a hammer.

My paternal Grandfather, Harry (The same grandfather that would ask me how old I was and then ask me to compute the square of that number) told me as a child that it was never too early to start investing in quality tools. Advice I have unsagely ignored for the last three decades. 

My 'man' drawer contains (in decreasing order of manliness) some wood glue (unopened), Basildon Bond lavender writing paper, a sewing kit, and a bag of nylon soft toy stuffing left over from the time I made my niece an alien robot ragdoll. 

No Etsy page for Finnginn just yet.

Nary a picture hook, nor a hammer? - hie thyself to Wickes! (As I imagine their advertising slogan would have stated in the 18th century.) Not straight away of course. First, try the Post Office - it's nearer and picture hooks, at least in my head, are in the crossover between stationery and DIY, sort of hardcore drawing pins. Naturally, the Post Office didn't have any but the nice lady did point me in the direction of Wickes, which didn't have any either but I was able to buy a hammer. 

At home, I placed my new hammer in my man drawer, thus increasing its manliness by around 30%. The pictures sat sulkily on the floor beneath their intended positions gathering dust. Spike avoided my eye. Two weeks to go... 

The Ricardian Equivalence Hypothesis

Sometimes you write a nice whimsical blogpost about how money isn't very much like ice-cream but could be more so and you think that's that and start to wonder about what to write for next week's post (maybe a nice poem about a juggler who falls in love with a knight or something) when 'ding' you notice that someone has left a comment.

Now, I don't get a lot of comments on my blog (even when I set fiendishly difficult riddles in mock Old Norse verse patterns for my readers to solve) so you can imagine how excited I was to read a response to my daydream of time-limited money being dropped into everyone's bank accounts. And then how disappointed I was to read that there are people out there that don't believe that ice-cream money would save the economy after all, in the words of 'JR':

Your theory sounds wonderful, but (and mostly to play devil's advocate), surely if you gave every person in England a £10,000 windfall, most of them would spend it repaying a loan they took out from the bank (or on the things they would have bought anyway, so they can pay the 'other' money back to the bank instead), so all the "spare" money would end up with the banks anyway? JR 

Incidentally, I meant to mention last week that the government of the UK has spent £200 billion on Quantitative Easing in the current crisis, had that money gone directly to the people that would have been a whopping £3,166 each! JR has ruined this statistic by making my figure look paltry next to his one.

A healthy economic community is one where each pound keeps getting spent and even when it winds up in the bank, the bank lends it out again. And, even though there isn't anything like enough cash for everyone to have all their money at once, everyone pretends there is and carries on sharing the same few pounds. You see this in action if you work in a bar, where you keep getting the same ratty fiver handed back to you. In a healthy economic community that fiver has got ratty because it has been through the tills and paypackets of so many local businesses.

If a government gave the money directly to the people some of it would become the useful type of money described in the previous paragraph. If the money had a time-limit on it (i.e the initial receiver can't just leave it in the bank) all of it would. 

I'm not sure that JR's argument holds even in the classic helicopter drop of giving everyone extra cash. We are not all rational actors who notice, a la David Ricardo, that this money can't just appear from nowhere, government bonds have to be repaid, taxes are going to go up, I better save my money. A lot of people would just think: 'Woohoo! free money! I'm going to buy a motorbike!' 

Ice-cream money

I overheard a mother explaining money to her kid in terms of ice cream. If you don't have any and you see everyone else eating it it makes you upset. But if you have too much then it can make you unhappy. The trick is to have some in the freezer so, when you fancy it, you can have a small amount as a treat.

That's sweet, I thought. I'll remember that. Then I got to thinking that money really should be more like ice cream.

Too much money should make you physically sick.

You should be allowed to make your own money, but it should be really difficult and, no matter how much you churn it, never quite resemble the real thing.

Money should be of great interest to children, but as you grow older you should lose the taste for it except on really hot days or when someone gets you some as a surprise and you remember that you really quite like it.

Money should melt unless you spend it quickly.

This last idea has frequently been suggested by economists (e.g. Oxford economics professor Simon Wren-Lewis) as an alternative to quantitative easing (QE). QE involves inventing money and giving it to your banker friends and hoping they will share it with businesses (hint: they won't) who will use it to pay staff (hint: they won't either) who will spend money (hint: even if it gets to them they will probably put it in a bank because they'll need savings when they lose their job) to get the economy moving. 

QE doesn't really work, for the reasons hinted at above. An alternative is helicopter money. Whereby money is invented, as above, but given straight to the people (figuratively 'dropped out of a helicopter'). To stop people squirreling this money away for a rainy proverbial, the free cash is time-limited. Unspent, it melts away - like ice-cream.

Hint for the second riddle of Heithrek

As nobody has yet been able to solve my riddle, here is a clue:

The question is in the answer.