Tom Roper's Weblog

Absolutely

Ian McMillan held forth, quite rightly, on the abuse of the word absolutely in Saturday's Guardian. I'm as guilty as any of the use of this as a modish substitute for the simple word 'yes'. However I think he is wrong to claim this as a recent phenomenon. When I was at university in the mid-seventies, a group of well-born hippies who marched around campus in gumboots and ethnic finery, known to us as the wretched of the earth, appropriated the word into their argot, uttering it in every sentence with a stoned lengthening of the third syllable. It was their catch phrase. And later, in the eighties, one would hear it from the lips of estate agents and financial advisors, and other shock-troops of the Thatcherite counter-revolution.

Travel in the 21st century

I read Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, Don't blame the system for winter travel chaos. Stay put, as I sat on a train hoping to get to work, and itemising the claims I need to make to Southern for disrupted journeys. I have stopped bothering to tweet the daily annoyances of my commute from Seaford to Wandsworth and back. On a good day I leave my house at 6.30 in the morning and return at about 7 at night. There have been few good days lately. As I leave, especially on fine days, I wonder what it would be like to stay put, to walk or run on the hills for the day, or watch the seascape from the beach. Jenkins starts from the premise that travel is undertaken frivolously, for pleasure. On the contrary. Modern capitalism is unable to offer work to many of the population. And for those of us who do have jobs, we cannot work where we live, but are required to make complex and lengthy journeys to workplaces far away. There are many organisations nearer home where I could use my skills and talents, universities, colleges, public libraries, government departments, cultural organisations of all sorts, but none of them are recruiting; indeed most have frozen recruitment, or are, like the University of Sussex, making people redundant. Yet, having required us to travel these long distance to work, capitalism is incapable of organising an efficient transport system to get us there.  When there is snow or ice, they pack up altogether. On the day I read Jenkins, with no snowfall, Southern offered only an emergency service.  The railway system is now largely foreign-owned and, as far as I can see, Southern does not give a fig whether I get to work in the morning or home in the evening. It has over £4,000 of my money for my season ticket and, for them, there the matter ends.

My night of metal hell

The ancients believed that the mother pelican fed her young by piercing her breast with her bill, and feeding them on her blood. This archetype of parental self-sacrifice is often cited chez Roper, but never with greater justification than last night when I took daughter, daughter's friend, and daughter's friend's boyfriend to Brixton to see Papa Roach, helpfully described by Time Out as 'triple-platinum nu-metal titans[...playing a] bellowing brand of emotionally bruised post-grunge".

We missed the first support act, and arrived in time for the second, whose name escapes me. Apart from some curious haircuts, the chief point of interest here was their desperation to ingratiate themselves with the audience. Sycophantically, Chicagoans to a man, they professed to love all things English, including football, which stretched belief. The greatest sycophancy was that, in every intro, they prostrated themselves before the headline act, promising us how good Papa Roach would be, how much they looked up to them, and so on and so forth. Is this a contractual requirement, imposed by Papa Roach on their support acts? Or a transparent attempt to improve their own reception by attaching themselves in the mind of the audience to the headline act they had come to see? An act of homage or abasement? Musically, they were loud.

After some fumbling by roadies, Papa Roach themselves took the stage. They are led by a diminutive young man, not handsome by any means, and one wonders at the psychological motives of a short man who decides to make a living yelling at crowds from a stage. They play in a genre that was empty and dated decades ago.

He flattered the audience relentlessly: "you're [expletive deleted] awesome', 'you [expletive deleted] rock' and so on ad nauseam. The music itself, crude and derivative, could have been made at more or less any point in the past forty years. Am I over-optimistic in expecting an art form to develop, to hope for intelligence and wit in music? For most of these fans, it is its very lack of development, its stagnation, that is its great virtue. As for the misogynistic and stereotypical lyrics, listen, if you must to Hollywood Whore for an example.

Throughout fans and the band would raise their fingers, in all seriousness, in the Italian sign for a cuckold, adopted by metal fans without any knowledge of its iconographical roots. With the passage of time, one might hope that it would now be used with playful, ironic intent. Not a bit of it.

I knew the end must be near when the traditional drum solo allowed the rest of the band to leave the stage for a fag. To maintain my sanity, I tweeted as best I could. In a venue which nears O2's name, the very people who collect a king's ransom for my iPhone every month, you would think, bestir themselves to put in a wifi network, or at least a decent G3 signal.

Then again, I must not be curmudgeonly. Daughter, daughter's friend, and daughter's friend's boyfriend enjoyed themselves and so, too, did the rest of the audience.

My iPhone 3.1 hell

I upgraded my iPhone to the latest version of the software on Friday, since when:

• it freezes and crashes constantly
• apps open and then close again immediate
• the battery life has deteriorated, for example I charged it fully overnight, and used it lightly today, lightly as I couldn't get it to play any music on my train journey in, yet by 2 pm the battery had expired
• the touch-screen often refuses to take any input at all

I've tried various tricks: removing the lock, turning off wifi, countless hard resets. If you haven't yet upgraded, dear reader, hold off, for heaven's sake.

On the road to Rio again

Readers who have stayed with me since March may recall the invitation I received to address an International Psycholinguistics Meeting in Brazil on the dichotomy between representational and derivational models. The organisers had mistaken me, a humble British librarian, for the distinguished professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Roeper.

I wrote to them twice to point out their mistake, but they continue to send me messages. The latest one arrived the other day, asking for a copy of my cv. I have supplied it: it may convince them that they have the wrong man. If not, I look forward to a first class flight to Rio and a few days in Brazil in January at their expense.

Bank holidays

Bank holiday have always been so so dull, from my childhood, when they were like another Sunday, only worse, to now. They don't offer a long enough respite from work to allow one to relax. There is nothing to do, expect try to rinse away the stale taste of the day with tea, or with something stronger.

Road to Rio

I have been invited to give a series of papers on psycholinguistics at a conference in Rio de Janeiro. A splendid opportunity, but it was not meant for me. Someone at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro wrote to me, saying that 'we follow your work here with interest, specially the Theory of Mind and recursion papers'. I'm very flattered; it took but a few seconds to discover a Professor Tom Roeper (note the extra e) at the University of Massachusetts who works in this field. I forwarded the message on to him, copying it to the original sender, and explaining that I was Tom Roper, not Tom Roeper, and that I thought the latter was the man they sought.

I thought no more; some thanks might have been pleasant, from either of the parties, but this is 2009. Then I received an e-mail from the distinguished professor, to me, not to the original sender, complaining that he had not had an attached brochure about the conference (yes he had). I imagined that he had not given the message from Brazil a close reading and that when he did, he would see that he needed to reply to the sender in Rio. In any case, I reasoned, surely the sender in Rio would, when she had my message explaining the mistaken identities, resend her message to the right man. So I did nothing further.

Of course neither the professor nor Rio had done any such thing. Yesterday Professor Roeper e-mailed me, without a copy to the people in Brazil, addressing me as 'Dear Aniela" not a name I have ever used, complaining once more that he had not had the attachment, and telling me that he has to plan other trips and cannot miss too many classes. I have replied once more, in polite but I hope clear terms, pointing out the error, copying to Brazil. I have offered to give them lectures on any aspect of librarianship, classical Greek or marathon running they wish. I hope they will read the message this time.

This is not the first time. DEFRA once offered me £40,000 to do some research on badgers, mistaking me for a Tim Roper who researches in animal behaviour at the University of Sussex. As in this case I sent it on to him, copying to DEFRA, but neither party bothered to thank me, What baffles me is how people can send important messages like this without checking they are sending them to the right person, and then, when their error is pointed out to them, not acknowledge it. I wonder if I could perhaps make a second income out of these misdirected messages

Light blogging

The small matter of moving house, and a wait of eighteen working days for broadband to be transferred to the new house mean that my updates have been sporadic. I rely on wifi in cafés in London, the over-subscribed and under-powered computers in Seaford library and the iPhone; Seaford is without public wifi, just as, when I tried to buy the London Review of Books in the new W H Smith, I was brusquely told that it is not 'on the list' .

Normal service will return soon but why does it take eighteen working days? I cannot imagine, as I am keeping the same telephone number, on the same exchange. Perhaps the new line will be gilded with several layers of gold leaf by highly-skilled painstaking craftsmen, and wrapped in rare and costly silks brought by camel train from the mystic Orient.

The mark of Cain

A passing reference in Robert Scoble's blog to the CEO of an American company who, to show his faith in his company in the face of the slump, had the company badge tattooed on his leg, set me worrying. What if this were to take off over here?

In Britain such behaviour would meet more scepticism than admiration. Can one imagine a British worker having the company's emblem engraved on his or her body in indelible ink with a vibrating needle? I think not. Imagine the anguish if image consultants were called in to change everything, or the mirth in the HR department when deciding who to sack:

'You can't sack Jenkins. He's had the company logo tattooed on his forehead'
'Oh, but think how funny he'll look in the JobCentre queue'.

And another thing...

...in the wasteland of further education, not only are we not recruiting enough students, not only, thanks to the latest government computer-based fiasco even more are put off because the Learning and Skills Council has made a hash of the EMAs (Education Maintenance Allowance: the financial incentive to lure 16-18 year-olds into colleges), the new catering contractors proudly presented us with the most illiterate menu ever seen. 'Panini's', it offers, along with a 'chicken speacial'. Add to this bizarre capitalisation of random words, and the effect is quite emetic. Will the food be so to?

And another thing....what is all this nonsense about psychological warfare against Al-Qaeda's 'brand'? See the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/26/alqaida.uksecurity. When word reaches the caves of Tora Bora that the focus groups don't like the brand, I'm sure bin-Laden will throw in the towel.

End of rant.