X plus ten, with the death toll looking to have stabilised at around the 6,000 mark, and a lot of collective holding of breaths to see what will happen next. It’s unlikely to be pleasant. We are supposedly at war, as the President made clear within hours of the attacks – a haste which might suggest he has shares in insurance companies, and wanted to afford them an easy “act of war” out to avoid having to pay any claims.

They aren’t the only ones in trouble, with the airlines now demanding federal help to avoid mass bankruptcies. Never mind the fact a lot of them were deep in the hole anyway, and this was just the straw that broke the back. We tried to book a flight to San Diego this weekend – hah! we’ll show those terrorists – only to face the usual price-doubling because we were booking within seven days of departure. You’d think the airlines would, at this time, be trying to encourage people to get back onto planes, but such is clearly not the case. Screw ’em – if they won’t let you take your own beer onto planes, I’d rather take the bus.

So Bush has declared war on terrorism. Let’s just hope that works a little bit better than the “war on drugs” we’ve been fighting for the past twenty years. And there are some disturbing similarities in the badly-defined enemies, non-specific objectives, and dubious methods being proposed here. If it does end up in a conventional war, it’s likely to be in Afghanistan – ring any bells, people? The Soviets spent fifteen years trying to subdue the residents there, before finally throwing their hands in the air and collapsing into capitalist anarchy. Do we think we are really going to do better? Anyone remember the last land war America fought in Asia against a technologically inferior enemy? Here’s a clue – it started with a V.

I say “we” in this case, which may surprise, given my usual detached approach to such things: hey, you want to go rescue Kuwait, go on, know yourselves out. I’ll watch the video highlights on the News at Ten. But this time, my step-son Robert is wobbling dangerously close to draft age, and if this turns out to be a long, drawn-out war (and it would be a naive optimist who’d predict anything else), who knows what might happen? I hear Canada is quite nice this time of year though.

The inevitable conspiracy theories have been floating, mostly revolving around the impossibility of a bunch of towelheaded terrorists getting past airport security with box-cutters, unless they had inside help. However, it’s pathetically obvious to anyone who has been through airport security, that it is staffed by $6.50 an hour security guards, and you get exactly what you pay for. The terrorists also had an advantage in that they only needed to hold the planes for long enough to point them at New York. Once word reached the fourth plane’s passengers of their likely fate, the hijackers were toast. Unfortunately, we can surmise that as they went, there also went the only remaining people capable of flying the plane.

Movies you will not be seeing on TV in the near future: Passenger 57, Die Hard, The Siege. Even Arnie is not immune, his upcoming Collateral Damage having been pulled, even though the terrorists had been changed from Libyans to Colombians beforehand anyway. Yet, oddly enough, terrorist flicks like those mentioned have been red-hot at the video shops – yet again proving how the media doesn’t have its finger on the pulse of popular sentiment as much as it’d like to think.

Already the reprisals have started. I’m “proud” to report that Phoenix was the location for the first revenge killing of an Asian-American, though some measure of the intellectual level of the assailant can be gained from the fact that the victim was a Sikh. Y’know, the ones that wear turbans, and so are immediately identifiable as not Moslems at all? Doh! Finally, a comment from Sven Taveby after last week’s editorial, which also sheds an interesting light on the media coverage of such events:

Die Stern (large German weekly magazine) and DN (Swedens largest morning paper) have tracked down the celebrating Palestinian woman. They asked her what she celebrated. The answer: We celebrated the free candy (kanafe, some kind of local sweets) that the *Palestinian* cameramen were handing out… In Swedish we call that “sjalv-mal”; kicking the ball into your own goal.

At the risk of stating the obvious, yesterday was not much fun. I was torn from my slumbers by Chris robustly shaking me awake – I knew something was up, since such behaviour generally leaves me doing my “bear with sore head” impression for the rest of the day. But when I saw the pictures on TV, all grumpy thoughts flew out of my head.

I don’t think I’ve ever watched the news for 16 hours straight, with such intensity. The only comparable event I can think of is the death of Diana, and that had much less impact because, frankly, I didn’t care any more about her, than about the victims of any other drunk-driving accident. It was vaguely sad. Now, get over it. Yesterday’s events were so inconceivable you couldn’t grasp them – at one point, they brought thriller writer Tom Clancy in, and even he said he’d never write anything so far-fetched.

There was an air of absolute unreality to it, particularly the videos they had of the second plane hitting the towers. At first, they were shooting from the wrong side, so you just saw a plane going out of sight, then three floors of the building exploding. But by late last night, they’d got it from the other side, showing the impact. It looked like a bad digital effect: I always imagined a plane hitting a building would bounce, but this just sliced into it like a knife through butter.

Worse still was the footage of people, trapped above the impact, jumping – eighty floors or more – to their doom. At the time, it made no sense, but when I saw the towers collapsed, I realised that perhaps it was a slightly cleaner death. At the time of writing, they still have no idea how many people are victims – the figure of 10,000 has been mentioned, but that is just a guess. It’s an inconceivable number anyway, the equivalent of wiping out my home town of Forres, and everyone for a couple of miles around.

After a very grim and depressing day, we tried to escape by going out for pizza, but even there, the TVs were tuned to the news. A lot of places weren’t open at all, and those that remained were eerily quiet, as were the streets; it seemed sacrilegious somehow to be doing something “fun” like eating out, when such calamitous events had taking place elsewhere, and we slunk home without feeling much better.

Predictably, there have been calls for retaliation, and scarily, a USA Today poll showed that a disturbing 21% of those surveyed didn’t want to bother waiting to find out who was actually responsible. Even speaking to more reasonable Americans myself, I’ve found it very hard to put across my point of view, that cruise-bombing an Afghan valley somewhere is not going to solve any problems.

They, understandably, want someone to pay (and, as an aside, footage of Palestinians cheering in the streets has not helped – even I, generally fairly sympathetic to their cause, was not impressed). But hitting someone over the head with a bigger stick kinda loses the moral high ground. It also makes your victim look for their own bigger stick, and let’s not forget that Afghanistan is just south of the world’s least well-secured nuclear arsenal…

I’d favour the approach pioneered by the Israelis and their intelligence agency, Mossad, who take out the personnel found accountable for terrorist attacks such as the 1972 Munich Olympics massacres with a finely-judged mix of surgical precision, brutality and booby-trapped mobile phones. All strictly non-accountable, of course, but it gets the message across. Obviously, all those who actually carried out the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks are now dead. But I strongly suspect someone was behind them – and if they can be made to look nervously over their own shoulder, it can only be a good thing.

So, here we are: the fourth anniversary of the Trash City web site is also (by dint of careful planning) our first day on www.trashcity.org – the first time updates will be published only to this address. trshcity.demon is now a dead duck, floating in the Internet like a…like a…like a dead duck. Update your bookmarks accordingly, though what’s left of Demon will be around for a little while (the bunch of incompetents in their accounts department still haven’t told me until when).

No particular reason why it’s taken so long to move here. The domain has been “ours” for a good few years now, and we’ve had mail-forwarding going on for almost as long. This was particularly handy during the move, when I knew that messages sent me at trashcity.org, would get to me regardless of the state of my email accounts. The forwarding still works and I prefer it, since it means I can have @trashcity.org rather than the doubtful street-cred of…er, well, actually we use AOL, which has so little street-cred, I’d need a scanning electron microscope to determine the precise quantity.

[Brief pause to save this file; there’s an electrician out back fiddling with the pool motor and we’ve already had the lights in the kitchen turned out on us. At first, I mistook him for a vagrant when he came to the front door, but – save for the confusion over the fuse-box – he seems to know his stuff…or at least, we hope so, anyway. The pool motor was fried during an electrical storm, and the lack of circulation means the water was starting to resemble some kind of biological warfare experiment.]

As .org officially becomes part of the Trash City empire, looking back, I have to laugh. Did Wendy James, lead singer of Transvision Vamp, have any idea, that one of their songs would lend their name to first a magazine, then a bead company, and now two prime pieces of Internet real-estate? I suspect not – if for no other reason than, I certainly couldn’t have predicted such a future, when I began my obscure 32-page, photocopied-at-work (in the dead of night) ‘zine back in the days when the Internet, DVDs and Tony Blair were all equally inconceivable.

Equally amazing is the thought that nine months have gone by since I moved out to Arizona – I think I’ve finally grown into the place, and the prospect of going back to London (or even worse, permanent employment) fills me with unquenchable dread. I now feel like I have settled in here, and my decade-plus in the tentacles of HSBC feels like a bad dream. It did take me a while to shake off the feeling of dread every time I was spotted writing a personal email during business hours, but I think I’m over that now…

This is why I am loathe to make any predictions about where TC is going to be four years down the line, given how laughably inaccurate they would have been, if I’d made them back in 1997. I was thinking about such things yesterday at the dinner-table, when Emily said she’d buy us a hovercar when she was a rich and famous actress. Hang on, weren’t we supposed to have these already? Them, and those little pills which were entire meals in a single capsule. I certainly don’t recall any “Life in the 21st century” articles which said it’d be pretty much the same, just faster, noisier and infinitely more wired…

But anyway: here’s to the next four, wherever they may take TC!

Not an enormous amount to write about this week, but I figure I’d better get another editorial up there, before any more Southern customers stumble across the last one. 🙂 It has to be said, they were actually very nice, but I’m still a little nervous about the strange crossover between the bead-buying public and visitors to this site – which will probably only increase next week when we finally launch…ooh, in red, I think…www.trashcity.org. It’s up and running already, actually – feel free to visit. Next week, tumbleweeds will roll across this site, save for an automatic redirection until my Demon subscription runs out. Whenever that is.

Rather large lottery jackpot here this week: a mere $295 million, the result of multiple rollovers (it’s harder to hit the jackpot here since, while you still have to pick six numbers, you have to nominate one as the Powerball) and some seriously frantic buying in the past week. Only 20 states take part, so those living elsewhere have to badger relatives or drive over the border to their nearest convenient location. It puts things into perspective, however, that if you drive ten miles to buy a ticket, you are sixteen times more likely to die on the trip than to win the jackpot.

You don’t actually get $295 million either: if you want a lump sum, you’d receive about half that, otherwise the jackpot is paid over 25 years (a bit of a con given that inflation would be steadily chewing into it), and in both cases, you have to pay tax on your winnings. Still, even in a worst case scenario, that’s a tasty chunk of change, maybe $60-70 million and it’s difficult enough to get your mind round that sort of money.

With an unerring knack, the people who win always seem to be thoroughly undeserving – the elderly (who inevitably dole it out among their equally undeserving children), or even a convicted armed robber in this case, though on the plus side, I guess the chances of him reoffending have probably all but evaporated. The worst kind are those who say, “It won’t change me. I’m still going to keep on working.” What is that nonsense? Of course it’ll change you, and the first thing I would do would be to replace the entire Trash City site (business division) with a “CLOSED FOREVER” logo. Anyone who wants to keep on working when they no longer need to, is showing a total lack of imagination.

I firmly look forward to the day when we can kick back and let our children take care of us. To this end, Emily was auditioned by a model agency (that’s basically a pimp with a receptionist) a couple of days ago. Sitting in the foyer, watching all the beautiful, high-cheekbones, totally vacuous people drifting in and out, I couldn’t help wishing I hadn’t succumbed to the heady delights of the Mexican dessert known as Xango – prononunced ‘Django’, and about as deadly. I comforted myself with the fact that I was not on heroin. Anyway, Emily now moves on to the second stage, where she has to go to classes to learn all the essential skills necessary for being a model/actress/whatever. Whether bulimia is part of the course, only time will tell.

And with that, it’s off to double update, to Demon and trashcity.org. Thanks to Demon for a largely painless service, and here’s to Trash City, the next generation!

Customer service has never really been my strong suit. “Does not play well with others”, would have been the sort of phrase you’d have seen on my annual performance appraisal. But it’s a skill which I am having to acquire these days, as the commercial arm of Trash City (the bead and jewellery supply side – the bit that finances all the DVDs, trips to odd conventions, etc.) has gone utterly berserk over the past couple of weeks.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that this near-doubling in sales volume coincides with the end of the school holidays. I think that once people get their kids packed back off into academia, they can return to gentle pastimes involving crimps, rondelles and other things which this time last year were purely trade jargon to me. Now, while I can perhaps not quite distinguish between Picture Jasper and Picasso Marble, I can identify most US states by their zip-codes, and tell a valid credit card from a dodgy one purely by the sound the terminal makes.

With experience, my telephone manner has certainly improved, even if the phenomenal level of unsolicited sales calls here is something I’m coming to terms with. In Britain, they were a sporadic occurrence, and almost a novelty. In Phoenix, the average day will have half a dozen cold calls, or attempts to send a fax through a voice line, offering us everything from mobile phones to business websites – and I take a pitch for the latter as a personal insult. My favourite approach is “Give me your home number and I’ll call you back later”; funnily enough, this usually seems to do the trick.

Fortunately, Chris has been here to help handle the trickier actual customers – largely those from South of the Mason-Dixon line. My basic rule of thumb is, if their state ends in a vowel – Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky being the main offenders (I adopt a relaxed attitude to vowels, please note) – she gets to talk to them, just as soon as she notices my frantically flailing arms and steadily increasing volume OF SPEECH. I’m sure they’re very nice people, it’s just that every time I hear them speak, I imagine I can hear banjos duelling in the background.

It doesn’t help that certain customers seem unaware of the time-zone differences here in the States. Just now, the East coast is three hours ahead of us, which means a brisk 9am call to them is ringing the bell here at 6am. And to someone like myself, who has a questionable approach to customer service at the best of times…well, let’s just say that 6am definitely does not count as said best.

This may partly explain the communication difficulties, with a large percentage of the conversations consisting, on both sides, of “What did you say?”, “Sorry?” and “Could you repeat that again?” Two countries, divided by a common language – and a couple of weird accents as well. Indeed, accents have a terrible habit of rubbing off on me; after the weekly phone-call home to my parents in Scotland, I unconsciously pick up on their speech patters, to the great amusement of the family here. I fondly hope that somewhere down in the Deep South, a customer who has just placed an order for beads with us is now unintelligible to her friends, as she now talks, at least temporarily, of “lifts”, “pavements” and “petrol”.