Insane in the Membrane

All that talk in my previous post about meaningless corporate jargon reminded me of an incident that happened some years ago, whilst I was working for that aforementioned company that was so prone to wholesale crimes against language.

At one point in the early 2000s, a phrase that was doing the rounds in the business world was 'sanity check'. According to Wikipedia:

"A sanity test or sanity check is a basic test to quickly evaluate the validity of a claim or calculation. In mathematics, for example, when dividing by three or nine, verifying that the sum of the digits of the result is a multiple of 3 or 9 (casting out nines) respectively is a sanity test.

"In computer science it is a very brief run-through of the functionality of a computer program, system, calculation, or other analysis, to assure that the system or methodology works as expected, often prior to a more exhaustive round of testing."

Well, despite the fact that - to the best of my knowledge - none of us were mathematicians or computer scientists, the phrase 'sanity check' quickly infected the local semantic environment. I assume it meant "carry out checks to make sure something works", but that probably didn't sound cool or important enough. Just as there are waitresses who dream of becoming actresses, I guess there are business people who fantasise about becoming mathematicians or computer scientists. Good for them, I say.

In any case, it wasn't long before 'sanity check' variations found their way into just about every meeting, briefing or presentation I was unlucky enough to attend. On one such occasion, myself and some colleagues were getting debriefed on some fab new system or other that was about to be implemented across the business. It was being held by a senior member of the management team, a middle-aged woman from a non-technical background who found it hard to keep up to date with corporate jargon. That's not a put-down, by the way. I'm a middle-aged man from a non-technical background who finds it hard to keep up to date with anything.

To be fair, though, she made a valiant effort. The presentation was generously littered with variations of this fashionable phrase. Things like: "Obviously, we'll need to sanity check that," "We carried out a thorough sanity check" and "The sanity check was vigorous." But each time she'd say it, there was a weird reaction in the room. Murmurs initially, but soon escalating into schoolboy snickering. I could see she was getting perplexed.

Eventually, someone decided to put her out of her misery. He stepped up to her and whispered helpfully in her ear: "It's 'sanity check', not 'sanitary check.'"

Only Forward

"Yet more than all this, the really lethal thing about the whole language of business - is that it is so brainlessly upbeat. All the celebrating, the reaching out, the sharing, and the championing in fact grind one down. Several decades too late, it is as if business has caught up with the linguistic spirit of 1968. The hippies got over it, but businessmen are holding tight."

That's from Lucy Kellaway on Radio 4's A Point of View, which I found myself listening to whilst driving to work on Sunday morning. It made me smile and that doesn't often happen as I drive to work, particularly on a Sunday morning. She delivered a witty, articulate and ever-so-Radio 4-ish rant about meaningless corporate jargon, and seemed to reserve a generous portion of her polite hump of hate for that particularly odious and pernicious phrase, 'going forward':

"When someone says 'going forward' it assaults the ears just as, when a colleague starts slurping French onion soup at a neighbouring desk, it assaults the nose."

That sentiment alone made me cackle so hard my tyres scraped a kerb. I imagine it had a similar affect on others unlucky enough to be driving to work on a Sunday morning. It definitely had a similar affect on that that peculiar demographic subset who were not only driving to work on a Sunday morning but were also once inmates at Cannon House. I should explain myself. For the best part of a decade I worked at a stockbroking firm in Birmingham (although to quote Marty DiBergi from This Is Spinal Tap: "Don't look for it; it's not there anymore."). Despite being a bit of a compassionate Leftie with Socialist tendencies (look it up), I became very fond of the place and met some terrific people. But even before the dot-com bubble finally burst - when the company, my department and my job were eventually downsized - there was a sinister downside.

The firm was infected with meaningless corporate jargon.

In episodes of Star Trek you'll often hear talk of temporal and spatial anomalies. Or so I've been told. In any case, somewhere deep within the bowels of Cannon House there was a fully functional semantic anomaly. Within the walls of that building otherwise decent, law-abiding people would find it impossible to construct a meaningful sentence with out shoehorning-in phrases like "thinking outside the envelope", "blue sky thinking" and "shoehorning-in phrases".

The most prolific and pernicious by far, though, was that bizspeak couplet that so annoyed Lucy Kellaway, namely: "going forward."

In her piece, Kellaway said:

"A man from the National Farmers' Union was talking about matters down on the farm and he uttered three 'going forwards' in 28 seconds.

"The previous radio record, by my reckoning, was held by Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor. He managed three 'going forwards' in four minutes on the Today programme..."

Lightweights, I say. If only she'd eavesdropped in on one of my old firm's management meetings her going forwards-ometer would have gone off the scale.

Back then, every time I heard that phrase a part of me died. It wasn't so much the words themselves, but it was the fact that bizspeak etiquette dictated that - for full impact - they should be incongruously bolted on to the end of a statement. I could just about handle: "Going forward, we predict an exponential increase in assets in account." Instead, what I had to endure was: "We predict an exponential increase in assets on account, going forward."

Now, I'm not as big an idiot as I sometimes make myself out to be. Whenever I hear a phrase like this my first though is always: "Jesus Christ on a Rubber Cross - NLP has a lot to answer for."

Even if the people who said the phrase in the first place don't realize it.

The Plastic Beer Skiff Snake

Over the years I've seen many jaw-droppingly odd things happen at gigs. I went to an Eric Clapton concert in 1988 where the person standing directly in front of me spent the night yelling "JESUS! FORGIVE ME! SAVE US FROM OUR SINS!" at Old Mano Lenta. I can only assume he once saw the famous image of the brick wall with the 'Clapton is God' graffiti and took it all a bit too literally.

The fact he bore an uncannily resemblance to Rasputin The Mad Monk didn't help matters. The yelling guy, that is, not Clapton. Clapton looked nothing like Rasputin The Mad Monk, at least not in 1988.

I went to a Flaming Lips gig in Birmingham in 2003 that was brought to a standstill after someone dancing on stage collapsed from heat exhaustion. In and of itself, that may strike you as unfortunate but not particularly odd. What puts the odd meter to the red line and nudges the event into the Realm of the Mentalated was the fact that the collapsee was dressed as a giant panda. Yes, that's right, a giant panda. As the music stopped and the band's effortlessly charismatic frontman Wayne Coyne made reassuring noises to the audience, paramedics had to be called to the stage to administer first aid to someone who was Dressed. As. A. Giant. Panda.

Maybe it's just me, then.

The most recent example took place at the thoroughly awesome Foo Fighters Wembley Stadium gig the other week. Now, I haven't been to a stadium concert for a l-o-n-g time. The last one was - Jesus Christ on a Pogo-stick! - The Rolling Stones at Maine Road in 1990, so maybe this sort of thing is now de rigeur and as commonplace as Mexican Waves and overpriced drinks. But somehow I doubt it.

Behold, The Plastic Beer Skiff Snake. It's a snake. It's made of plastic beer skiffs. It was an impromptu collaborative effort that involved hundreds of people.

Look upon it's length, ye mighty, and despair:

"Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends"

That, in case you don't know, is a Waiticism - a quote by the legendarily quotable singer-songwriter Tom Waits. Like many of Waits' lines I've used it at numerous society events and apologise now for giving anyone the impression that I'd invented it myself. I did, however, coin the phrase Waiticism. It's not one I'm particularly proud of.

I picked up Friday's Independent because it had an interview with Waits. It turns out I'd already read it on his record label's website, but that didn't stop me from reading it again. Like his recent press conference, it plays fast and loose with the traditional rules of the interview format. For one thing, he asks himself the questions.

Needless to say, it's full of sublime wit and is tremendously entertaining:

Q: Do you have words to live by?

A: The director Jim Jarmusch once told me, "Fast, Cheap, and Good... pick two. If it's fast and cheap, it won't be good. If it's cheap and good, it won't be fast. If it's fast and good, it won't be cheap." Fast, cheap and good... pick two words to live by.

Q: What do you wonder about?

A:

1. Do bullets know whom they are intended for?
2. Is there a plug in the bottom of the ocean?
3. What do jockeys say to their horses?
4. How does a newspaper feel about winding up papier-mâché?
5. How does it feel to be a tree by a freeway?
6. Sometimes a violin sounds like a Siamese cat; the first violin strings were made from catgut – any connection?
7. When is the world going to rear up and scrape us off its back?
8. Will we humans eventually intermarry with robots?
9. Is a diamond just a piece of coal with patience?
10. Did Ella Fitzgerald really break that wine glass with her voice?

My favourite bit, though, isn't actually a Waiticism as such. Rather, it's his favourite quote from the architect, designer, futurist and all-round polymath that was R. Buckminster Fuller. To wit:

"Fire is the sun unwinding itself from the wood."

That, my friends, is poetry. I've been a big fan of Bucky Fuller since discovering his work and theories via the late, great Robert Anton Wilson. I didn't realise until this interview that Waits' was a fan, too. I like it when that happens.

Anyhow, there's more good stuff about the interview here.

KHAAAN!

For the benefit of Clare, Lily and Kiki the Kat, I found this via Pete's blog last year and just had to share it:

Books, etc

I don't normally do these things, but here's a book meme I nabbed from Rol.

The rules are simple: highlight in bold the books you've read, bold-and-italicize the books you'd like to read again and put a line through the books you started-but-never-managed-to-finish.

Whatever's left are books you haven't read.

Here goes:

* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel
* Anna Karenina
* Crime and Punishment
* Catch-22
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
* War and Peace
* Vanity Fair
* The Time Traveler’s Wife
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations
* American Gods
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
* Atlas Shrugged
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
* The Canterbury Tales
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Love in the Time of Cholera
* Brave New world
* The Fountainhead
* Foucault’s Pendulum
* Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
* The Count of Monte Cristo
* Dracula
* A Clockwork Orange
* Anansi Boys
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray
* Mansfield Park
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
* Cryptonomicon
* Neverwhere
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* Cloud Atlas
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey
* The Catcher in the Rye
* On the Road
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers

Looking at it, I can't help but feel an initial twang of intellectual insecurity. Surely I should have read more than that? There's certainly plenty of books in the list I'd like to read at some point. For one thing, I'd like to read more Dickens: I read Bleak House in my early 20s and Oliver Twist when I was about 11. As I approach the closing overs of my third decade I'd like to read some more.

Then I look at the list again and don't feel so bad.

As Rol said:

The only thing that disturbs me about whoever put this list together is that it features THREE books by Neil Bloody Gaiman, yet nothing by Douglas Coupland, Haruki Marukami, Jack London, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Chuck Palahniuk, Iain Banks, or any number of other writers I might name.

Personally, I don't have a problem with Neil Gaiman - he's an immensely talented and charismatic fella. But the inclusion of three of his novels (American Gods, Anansi Boys and Neverwhere) is probably a bit much. A certain James Augustine Aloysius Joyce also has three books on the list. Does that mean that the author of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had no greater an impact on literature than the author of Sandman, Violent Cases and Secret Origins Special #1?

I also thought it odd that both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were on the list. I learnt about Ayn Rand and Objectivism via Rorschach from Watchmen and Steve Ditko comics, so I can't help but feel that two Ayn Rand novels are two too many. If you're an Ayn Rand fan, though, try not to judge me too harshly. I know what you guys are like.

Like Rol, though, I can't help but notice what's been left out of the list. As well as the authors he mentions, if the list also included - say - some Phil K Dick and some Robert Anton Wilson then there'd be a lot more bold type up there.

Probably some italics, too.

Flu Fighters

Well, I didn't get around to writing a proper review of last Saturday's absolutely Goddamn awesome Foo Fighters gig at Wembley Stadium because, since then, I've been sick as a pike.

Even on the day of the gig I was far from ship shape and Bristol fashion. I started the morning with some low-level nasal congestion, by late-afternoon had numerous achy limbs and and I saw the evening in with some irregular and embarrassing bouts of violent and theatrical sneezing. The surprise Led Zeppelin semi-reunion seemed to sort it all out, though - temporarily at least. It's too bad you can't get surprise Led Zeppelin semi-reunions on the NHS. It'd work wonders for the nation's health, especially once we get Robert Plant onboard.

Anyhow, by Sunday night my temperature had sky-rocketed and on Monday morning the nausea had kicked in. I was in no fit state to go to work, let alone write a proper review of last Saturday's absolutely Goddamn awesome Foo Fighters gig at Wembley Stadium. I was probably in no fit state to write my name on a dusty Venetian blind, but luckily no one was expecting that of me.

On Wednesday morning I woke up to discover hideous, bulbous protrusions on my left hand and forehead. It made me look like a cross between Dan Dare's nemesis The Mekon and a political analyst from the BBC. Now, I'm no expert on medical matters, but left hand and forehead bulbous protrusions are not traditional flu symptoms.

It turned out that a mosquito had found its way into our bedroom, and the little bastard had spent the night feasting on me. I hadn't even realised there were mosquitoes in Birmingham, let alone that they had it in for me. Maybe it's a global warming thing.

In any case, I'm only sharing this with you because I know you care.