Funfare for the Common Man

‘In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.’ Jean-Paul Sartre Кто не рискует, тот не пьет шампанского. (‘If you don’t risk, you don’t drink champagne.’) I love blaming others. Especially when it’s not my fault. I won’t hesitate to throw people under the bus. Does this make me a bad person? Probably. So, even though I decided at the start of the World Cup that I was going to let fate determine how I would invest for my daughter’s future – I mean, that’s not a terribly irresponsible thing to do at all! – I am still not going to take responsibility for coming up with such an absurd idea. It’s not my fault – simply, the wrong teams made it to the semifinals and then the final. How was I to know? (This is a follow-on from my last post . If you haven’t yet read that, then the following will probably make little to no sense. Unlike most of my posts, which make perfect sense and are always clear, logical and easy to follow.) I won’t ge...

My blog has been, over the years, if nothing else but ‘eclectic’. It started off with my wistful peregrinations around Kyrgzystan and Central Asia and then moved on to university life in rural New Hampshire with my wry and not-always-so-astute observations of the locals and their antics. From there it has meandered into a ridiculous array of topics, from love & relationships to existential angst to consumer boycotts to me whingeing about technology and cultural transgressions and deeply irritating quirks. There has been way too much philosophy in and there have also been some misguided, cack-handed and possibly ill-advised forays into the world of finance & investing, football tactics and strategy (far too in-depth for a lay audience and not perceptive enough for football junkies), not to mention [American] football gambling with my wife and cat. There is really quite a range of topics that I have attempted to cover over the years. This blog is, also, more than anything ...

After my last post, I was asked this: ‘are all your posts going to be so negative?’ From the falling intonation and the forlorn look on my interlocutor’s face, I think she was somewhat disappointed with my, uh, ‘tone’ in my last offering. A few days later, I was asked an almost identical question, yet with a completely different look and sound of expectation and delight: ‘are all your posts going to be about complaining and the things that people do to annoy you?’ This time it was said with rising intonation and a look of ‘oh, please, more, more, more!’ I said something like ‘most probably.’ She broke into a wide smile and started rubbing her hands with glee. A fellow misanthrope! Hey, you can’t please everyone “The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.” Schopenhauer “Have I not the reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.” William Hazlitt, On the P...

If there has been one constant and consistent – and incessant – narrative coursing through this blog over the years it has been my ad nauseam ranting and raving about technology. I think it all started with this post from 2010 and from then on, it’s always hard to resist the temptation to have another whinge about technology and its pernicious effects. Perhaps one day I will look at it from the other side and come up with something positive. But for now… I do realise that ‘technology’ is such a ridiculously broad area to complain about. There are far too many angles to tackle, but there are two trends that worry me the most: the idea that technology is a panacea for so many problems, or what Evgeny Morovoz calls the ‘folly of technological solutionism’ , and how impatient it has made [some of] us. What I’ve been reading The other day I read ‘ How It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails ’. The headline alone was enough to make me feel better about life, especially with...

Wait, in my last post, and first of this year, did I really claim that I was going to post 52 times this year? Seriously? What the hell was I thinking? I referenced the financial writer and investing guru Jason Zweig in my last post, and this is what he said at the start of his article on resolutions: ‘Don’t resolve to do something so easy it doesn’t require a resolution, nor something so hard no resolution could make it achievable. Resolutions are for raising the bar, not for laying the bar on the ground and hopping over it or for putting the bar too high for anyone to reach. Make all your resolutions in public. The fear of social pressure, whether it materializes or not, will help you keep your word, since you are pledging not just to yourself but to others…’ (emphasis mine) [Gulp.] Talk about pressure: I’m already being asked about this! Way, way back in my undergraduate days, I took a history course on the Holocaust, and I had exactly one assignment, wh...

Many years ago, before my teaching days (and before I had even planned on becoming a teacher), I worked at Waterstone’s bookshop in Belfast in the run-up to the Christmas period (and I was sorely tempted to stay on permanently – that might have been the best job I’ve ever had and my not-so-secret dream is still to run my own bookshop one day, but alas…). After the Christmas holidays I remember having to put out books for the section entitled ‘New Year, New You!’ These books were downright appalling in terms of cringeworthiness: your usual mélange of self-help gurus proffering up advice about positive thinking, happiness, getting into shape, eating more healthily, acupuncture, meditation, the Kama Sutra, being a calmer person, not kicking puppies, etc, etc. In some ways I’ve mellowed out over the years and in others I’m just as much of a grouch as I always have been. But I’ve never really liked the idea of your more standard run-of-the-mill resolutions, the kind that everyone says ...