Camping it up

I've got the builders in. (Ooo-err, Missus.) And being at home at the moment is less like living in a house, more like staying at a campground.

Tools are everywhere. Broken tiles abound like shattered dreams on the seashore of night. Going to the toilet is fraught with unimaginable hazard. My bathroom is more a state of mind than a place to freshen up, and I'm showering at the gym daily. (Who'd have thought the best incentive to go to the gym would be renovating your house?) I've cleared away most of the 400 or so tiles on the walls, exposing everything from chewed plasterboard to bare breezeblock to ratty plywood, but scheduling problems have left a few days in between plumbing and tiling where the only place to wash my face is the kitchen.

And the dust! I'd forgotten just how much dust even one room's worth of refurbishing makes. Once again, I thank the stars for making me choose hard floors rather than anything fuzzy; they're much easier to clean.

And, of course, I thank the Poles. 600,000 Polish people have come to London since 2003 and, unlike any other ethnic/cultural group, they've caused no problems whatsoever. They're hardworking, friendly, thoroughly decent, here to work not benefits-sponge or import controlled substances. All builders in London are now Polish, everything from carpentry to plumbing to tiling. And they're pretty good at it.

Which is, of course, why my home looks like a campsite this week.

Because Poland is a Catholic country, and Easter is important to Poles. Which means those 600,000 Poles have all fucked off back to Krakow for two weeks and I've been left in the lurch with - horrors - British, Aussie, and Kiwi builders. Go figure.

Phwooooaaarr, look at that!

Wow! "300". The most brilliant thing to come out of Hollywood since Sin City. Forget the license taken with history (the giant elephants were a bit of a giveaway); the film's a work of art, every frame deserving of a frame of its own, something gilted gold or richly red as the Spartans' capes.

I just wish I'd waited for it to arrive in IMAX. (It's the first film I've seen at my local multiplex in full digital - the cinema's actually the first in Europe to be fully without film, but most releases still get sealed in a can before transfer to digital.) But on a Sunday afternoon, in the front row, the effect's still excellent, even if it uses more gay iconography than 'Top Gun'.

(News to you? The reason Tom Cruise's outing gave the 80s a whole new look was all in the way the fighter-jock epic used camp. Watch 'Top Gun' again wearing homospectacles. There's something gay in every shot.)

The dialogue's not up to much - but for the right reasons. Just as bad Shakespeare sounds like a mass of tired quotations, the battle of Thermopylae (Hot Gates, geddit?) gave rise to many real phrases that have lost power through overuse. "We shall fight in the shade" when arrows will "blot out the sun", "Come and get them" as a retort when the Spartans are asked for their weapons.... there's a fair chance they were actually spoken in 480BC, although Herodotus probably polished them up when he wrote it up.

Thermopylae is a story; 300 is cinema. And it's the best couple of hours I've spent in a darkened room for a long time.

Rocket lands near Moon

Well, not exactly, but it was such a good missed headline I wanted to pass it on. Besides, it's continuing yesterday's space theme.

Versace

Pondering on why, when I'm a diehard Modernist of sharp outlines and white boxes, I love anything by Versace. I mean, you'd think one of the less flamboyant Italians, like Armani, would be more my scene.

But there's something in the way Versace oozes personality and quality, intricate patterns executed in the best fabrics. The brand of a sultan rather than his merchants. I don't wear any of the clothes (being neither female nor gay) beyond a few bits, but I admire the beautiful designs the same way I admire a Mandelbrot Set ... or the trace-trail outlines drawn by a particle accelerator searching for the Higgs ... or the Islamic decorations that predate Penrose tesselations, non-repeating patterns that cover a vast area yet retain fivefold symmetry.

It's because there's science in there, blended perfectly 50:50 with the art.

All my ties are Versace, all totally different in colour and pattern, yet somehow all part of the same family. (A red, and a blue, and a yellow one. Maybe I should add magenta, green, and cyan ones for a hex palette? Hey, I could continue on with spring, teal, orange, pink, violet, and azure and I'd still be web-safe!)

I've got a black Versace suit too, and it just 'fits right', sculpted around the body to give an idealised tweak or two to the male silhouette. That's why only gay men can design clothes; straight men just aren't interested enough in the male body and women don't identify with it enough.

Those Versace guys. They even die artistically.

Thanks for nothing, Gordon

Once again Gordon Brown proves how clueless he is about the UK economy and where growth really comes from, with the added edge this year of trying to tell everyone he'll be a really, really good Prime Minister.

OK, so the fall in income tax to 20% (from 22) is welcome, given that's the band most working people fall into. But doing away with the 10% minimum rate for incomes up to £8K or so - hurting the people earning the least, most? Wonder what the statistics are to support that?

At least public spending's being dragged, kicking and screaming, downwards a bit after years of gorge and gush towards the NHS. Net borrowings down to a manageable 2.7% of GDP. That'll help pay for the £25bn budget surplus he turned into a deficit in the last ten years.

Of course, there were plenty of handouts to those whose votes he'll need. £8bn to plug holes in pension gaps created by second-order effects stemming from Brown's own £5bn tax grab on pension funds. What the man taketh with one hand, he... taketh again with the other.

And small business gets hit hard, with tax rising from 20% to 22% in the next two years. Gordon Brown really hates small business - well, he hates business in general, but sees small businesses as the ones easiest to push around.

Classic Brown with a twist. I just hope the Budget doesn't push the real news off the front pages tomorrow: the ex-Head of the Civil Service's tirade against Brown's control freakery and superiority complex. Come on Turnbull, have another go. This fight's not over yet.

It's not a bug, it's a feature

SpaceX's version 2.0 of its Falcon rocket didn't hit the heights expected earlier... but it's far from a failure. This privately-built, privately-financed spacecraft reached space, improved on its predecessor, and did so on schedule. And it's only when you consider just how ineptly government has monopolised space - the unlimited budgets thrown at Apollo, the giant white elephant that is the Shuttle - that you understand what a big deal this is.

I just hope Elon Musk knows what's coming. (He should do. Created world's first non-bank payment system? Built the first 'real' electric car? Sending the first private satellite launch vehicle up? When does this guy sleep?) Once governments realise private enterprise can do it better, they'll try to keep even tighter control of space: not through competition and the market, but by legislation and restrictions. Space doesn't belong to governments, or military; I hope Elon will fight.

"AAAAAAHHHHH!" reasoned the man at the corner of Lower Rd

He's got in it for me, definitely. There's a bum at the corner of the local High St, one of two aggressive ones 'living locally' that probably regard Lewisham Nick as their primary residence, and once again, heading into town, I got the single yelled torrent of hate, 'AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!' He's really LOUD.

It costs £50K a year to run the services that keep each homeless guy in London alive, and all that £50K does is manage the problem; it doesn't provide the solution. That guy might be screwed up with hate, violent and troublesome and a menace to society, but he's also (probably) mentally ill and racked by addictions. And with up to eleven goverment agencies dealing with him - none of them communicating with each other - he's on the streets, effectively, for good.

I support the radical solution recently proposed. Instead of £50K, every year, to keep them in misery, forever, spend that same £50K in three months... to give each rough sleeper actual treatment, a residential course that gives them an address, medical help, and a chance to get their shit together. Such courses have a success rate of two-thirds. What gives it weight is that this solution was proposed not by Whitehall, but by the founder of The Big Issue - a former rough sleeper himself. The most important part of it - don't give them any choice.

My 'Aaaaaah!" man is probably beyond help. But there are plenty of people on London's streets who don't deserve to be there: ex-armed forces people unable to adjust to civilian life (over a third), people brought up in the bedlam of Britain's overpoliticised child protection services (another third) and those who've simply fallen throught the cracks and desperately want to climb up, but can't find the footholds.

It's a bit like thinking about the jail population. Yes they're nearly all guilty, but there's got to be something in the way 80% of male prisoners have a reading age below 11...

These are uncomfortable thoughts for a social darwinist like me, but necessary. Give 'em the care they need - but make it Tough Love.

Suited and booted

On the subject of faces (see Bond earlier) I had a shock walking through Bank yesterday.

I was dressed in a suit and tie for a change, and if I say so myself, I looked The Business, easily holding my own with the throngs of thrusting young investment bankers that inhabit that part of town. More, though, I caught sight of myself in a window and realised I looked like An Adult. A mature human male. Confident and purposeful, the kind of man who'd have a car with more than two seats, perhaps even own a lawnmower.

I'd just been to the gym and even the ruddy face and spiky hair looked more like the solidity and patina of age than the flush of extended youth. I was quite pleased: maybe I'll grow old gracefully after all. My natural father apparently gets mistaken for a guy in his 40s (at 60something) and still jumps around rooftops fixing his house. And surely it can't be a coincidence that at 36 I'm feeling stronger and fitter than I've ever done in my life. (Triathlon is the ideal sport for over-30s, after all - the balance of three disciplines is great for all-round toning.)

And this morning, I feel somehow... different. A bit more mainstream. And a few more things in my life just seem to fit better. The way I've been unhappy at work recently (copywriting's a boy's job, not a man's, even when it pays six figures) and the strange attraction of buttoned-down, deep-thinking management consultancies as clients rather than the flashy, surface-obsessed ad agencies.

Ready for the next phase of life.

The perfect Bond

Hmmmm... a genuinely interesting bit of pop science coverage. By merging the faces of actors Ian Fleming thought had the characteristics of his imagined 007, researchers have created an image of what Bond 'really' looked like. A 1940s face that demonstrates also-ran Clive Owen would actually have been in the running had Fleming been around for the decision. I still enjoyed 'Casino Royale' though.

The secret of successful dealmaking

I'm thinking of taking up smoking.

The reason? Once again in the papers, a journalist described important deals being done in 'smoke-filled rooms'.

I haven't done any deals for a while, and it's obviously because I'm not spending time in these rooms. In fact, the number of such rooms seems to be going down. Until recently they were often clearly marked in many office buildings.

If I take up smoking, I'll have an excuse to visit the smoke-filled rooms, and get involved in important business deals.

Better still, if I fill my own rooms with smoke, perhaps some important people will visit and start doing deals in them!

Hmmmm.... I wonder if the gaggles of office workers taking ten-minute breaks outside most buildings in the City count as smoke-filled rooms at a pinch? Doubt it - these rooms are always described as being 'darkened' too.

The feeling of power this gives me could become addictive.

Captain America goes the way of US democracy

So Captain America has been killed off. Definitely the right thing to do: given the character's strong association with the American government and military, the writers must have had a hard time in recent years, with American democracy in its death throes. What would he be defending? They had two choices: turn him into a rebel, or kill him off.

Farewell to innocence

I think I've worked out the single concept that defines Britain's bossy New Labour government, and it's a bit more cerebral than I thought it'd be.

The basic thought: New Labour's unwritten goal is to destroy the presumption of innocence. To treat citizens as guilty until proven innocent, of whatever they feel like accusing you of.

An ancient legal principle, yet technology and policy have been treating it as a minor inconvenience ever since Blair came to power. It's not a sweeping tidal wave of change in public policy; it's an attitude, a million little changes in procedures and precedents that add up to a wholesale destruction of a basic principle of liberty.

The right against unreasonable stop and search. The right to a private family life. The right against seizure of personal property. All going down the pan. And because it's being executed drip by drip, it's far more corrosive to society than one big bang would be.

It's in the way CCTV has been turned on motorists, with barely a whisper. (Of course it was. All new technology gets used in unintended ways; the street finds its own uses for things.) Or the way police now invite several thousand local men matching a rapist's ethnicity to 'volunteer a DNA sample', with the unspoken threat that if you don't you're a suspect. Fingerprinting 11 year olds, just in case. Charles Clarke thinking every ID Card should eventually carry a DNA sample too, without giving a moment's thought to the knowledge (medical, mental, even behavioural) that makes available to government as we work out, gene by gene, what DNA does.

All these things have good outcomes, they smile. Because they're not big thinkers; nobody in New Labour has the intellect to consider iterative outcomes and second-order effects. (Odd, since it's usually the Left who emobody most political brainpower.) The Conservatives at least have some brains in their ranks.

It's dangerous as hell. But at least I now understand that driving factor underpinning it all. Which means, perhaps, it's easier to fight.

Little pointy metal things

In the things-you-find-you-need category: metal collar stiffeners, to replace the vinyl ones that come as standard even on £180 bespoke shirts. I'll stretch to the steel ones, but I think £250 for stainless silver is overkill.

Ghost of a chance

Ghost Rider. Dear me, where to start?

This is a bad film. Not redeemably bad, like the second two 'Matrix' films, and not so bad you're almost enjoying it out of sheer masochistic fingers-down-the-throat astonishment, like Guy Madonna's 'Revolver'. This film is in the same league as 'Troy': wooden, predictable, lazily scripted, and all the special effects in Hollywood can't make it exciting. No story there.

Nick, you're wasting yourself. Get back to the 'Leaving Las Vegas' type roles, where you actually did some acting.

Catch me if you can

Ha ha, hilarious. American police have created a MySpace profile for a bank robber to see if anyone can identify him. (He's got 915 friends as of this blogdate.)

I wonder what the legal implications are here? Is this similar to putting up Wanted posters, or does it infringe more basic liberties, such as personal identity and misrepresentation? Either way, I doubt the guy's coming to come forward and correct it.