Art I like #5

Good morning.

Somedays I make a habit of staring at something interesting before I leave begin my commute.

This is today's something.



- I write in order to avoid talking, for you see as a human, I suck at talking

Location:In between sleeps.

Reading

The Telegraph has been my newspaper of choice lately. The editorials are usually dense layers of confusion and adverbs but I find them informative. There was a pretty powerful piece this week about the ticking time-bomb that is Britain's personal debt, which is valued at £1.5 trillion - more than the country's GDP. You can read it here.

The Frankie Boyle romp 'Work! Consume! Die!' (yes there are that many exclamation marks) is very entertaining. He casts his bottomless cynicism and taboo humour over many a topical issue, while interspersing one of his own short stories. One fond memory I can recall, was when he commanded me to imagine Cheryl Cole as a judge at The Hague. His phonetic interpretation of her accent had me laughing out loud, much to the discomfort of the other passengers on the 41 bus.

The book about surviving a baby's first year was my Halloween spine-chiller. Learning about colic, bonding and the importance of adult time, sent me into a frenzied spiral I hadn't felt since watching Saw at the cinema. I'll return to it one day, I hope.


- I write in order to avoid talking, for you see as a human, I suck at talking.

Location:Staring into my iPhone.

Pets?

As a regular user of public transport there are a number of things I have come to accept and indeed tolerate, but something that I cannot quite get to grips with is the presence of animals on the bus. Do not be mistaken, I like animals. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I quite love animals. I love then when they lie snuggled up in a toasted bun with lettuce, onions and relish, or when they are diced and tossed liberally onto a bed of mixed leaves, but these gargantuan descendants of Digby that owners try to masquerade as pets is a whole other caper.

They saunter on the bus with their owners, mouths foaming with the taste of human flesh wrapped around their gums, separated from the public by what would, under normal circumstances, be considered a sturdy chain but in this instance, is nothing stronger than the hair found on the head of a newborn.

When I was younger, there was a certain criteria an animal had to meet for it to be classified a domestic pet, for example, if your pet has wider shoulders then the current world heavyweight boxing champ, then they are probably not a pet. Or if they possess incisors sharp enough to tear your skin to confetti, then they are a long ways off from being a pet.

Perhaps my neighbour is right, we are living through the 'super-size' age and pets are the latest to fall victim to this ideology. Perhaps.







- I write in order to avoid talking, for you see as a human, I suck at talking.

Fear.

I've been stewing on the concept of 'fear' and I've trying to categorise it but this has proved a challenging feat. For example, I have a fear of mice and rats. Rationally, I am several times larger and stronger than any of those creatures, so my instinct is to categorise that particular shortcoming as irrational. However, to do that is to discount context. For example, as a child, I was frequently told that mice and rats harbour disease and were key agents in the spreading of the plague. Given this context, my fear of rodents is actually a fear of ailment and ultimately death, which sounds a tad more rational.

This string of nonsense led to me reclassify fear, opting for 'tangible' and 'intangible', labels that account for physical and abstract ideas. After the reclassification, I found that most, if not all my fears lie within the remit of the intangibles, those slightly complex and abstract ideas, like death and humiliation.

Such a disappointment to realise that I have an aversion to concepts that my mind should be able to tame.

Maybe you should try it. List your fears and see which are tangible and which are intangible.

- I write in order to avoid talking, for you see as a human, I suck at talking.

Location:The staff room.

Things I learnt this week (the Steve Jobs edition).

I’ve spent the lion share of the morning reading various obituaries and editorials on the life and exceptional contributions of Steve Jobs and have learned the following things:

1) Follow your passion and interests. Steve was a lover of all things electronic and found a mentor in one of his neighbour. His passions led him to have a conversation William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard during his early years about a missing component from one of their products.

2) Do what you feel to be right, not what others tell you is right. Steve dropped out of university. He saw that the cost of the tuition was eating away at his parents savings accounts and didn’t believe that to be the best use of their nest-egg. I’m sure Steve’s parents and his fellow classmates would have loved him to continue to study and aim for Cum Laude graduation status but instead, he decided to invest in himself and his ideas.

3) Defeat is a passing phase, not a static state. Before Steve Jobs made the iPod and its various mutations, he was responsible for a few commercial flops, notably, the ‘Lisa’ desktop computer.

4) Belief and vision are priceless. Steve bought a computer graphic and animations company from George Lucas, believing that the company’s creative output would be a staple of modern cinema. After years of nurturing and support, the group became what is now known as Pixar Animation Studios who released their first film, Toy Story, in 1995, raking in some £362 million in box office receipts.

5) Legacy is inevitable. Whether you are a pauper, a prisoner or responsible for one of the biggest evolutions in consumer electronics, you will leave a collection of people and places that hold memories of you.

The age of the unimpressed.

I think we are all slightly ungrateful and worse still, are becoming harder to impress. Like most, I was glued to the Apple keynote speech last night. The majority of it was just a re-hash of the iOS 5 features with a few new additions, such as Cards – Apple’s attempts at usurping Moonpig and Find my Friends, an app that allows you to track friends and family for a period of time - which pretty much buys into the hypotheses of many a dead science fiction writer.




Of course the main  event was the announcement of the iPhone 4S. I have spoken to a few tech-savvy individuals and a few laymen and both parties are deeply unimpressed and somewhat saddened by the product and are all too happy to post their disillusionment on various blogs and feeds. Somehow, being given shiny new everythings on a regular basis has turned us into spoilt lemmings with a diminishing capacity to be wowed.



Cosmetically, the new iPhone is almost identical to the current iPhone 4 model but the guts of the new handset are impressive and should not be so easily dismissed. It boasts a dual-core processor – DUAL CORE! I work in offices where staff routinely use computers/laptops that run on Pentium 3 or 4 chips. Remember those? Of course you don’t they were at the forefront of technology back in 2002.



I guess the reactions to the iPhone 4S reminds me of the individual who watches porn online but vents fury when the word ‘buffering’ appears and stops them mid pleasure – somewhere along the lines, perspective and appreciation of technology has been replaced with an over-inflated sense of instant gratification.