Yes, a very pleasant weekend in New York, thank you. I’ll spare you the details – you’d only get jealous – but do want to mention a couple of airport incidents, which shed an interesting light on bureacracy and those that enforce it.

#1. On the way into America, you have to fill in a visa waiver form, stating you’re not a war criminal, drug baron or are coming to America to engage in “moral turpitude” (a great phrase – if I ever find out what it means precisely, I’ll let you know). You also have to give your address in America, which is where I hit my problem: I was being picked up at the airport, so didn’t know the precise address. When I realised this, I naturally spent the rest of the flight sweating in terror – though that might have been to do with the Better Midler movie they showed as inflight “entertainment”…quotes used advisedly.

Lining up to go through immigration, I speak to one of the queue-shepherds, resplendent in full immigration uniform, and explain the position. “Well, you can’t leave it blank. Just put down a hotel,” she says. “The Marriott’s the usual one,” she adds helpfully. I look quizzically at her to see if she’s serious: yep, she is genuinely suggesting I put down a complete fabrication. In somewhat shaky Biro, I do so, carefully noting what she looks like, so I can shriek “It was her! She told me to do it!” as they drag me away in chains. Needless to say, standing in front of the immigration official was somewhat nerve-wracking – every second, I expected “So which Marriott Hotel is it then?” to come from his lips — cue chains, shrieking, etc. Of course, it didn’t and this terrorist entered the USA without leaving a paper trail – I felt somewhat Carlos the Jackal-like. But it just goes to show how easy it is to bypass regulations. Which brings me to…

#2. Thanks to a couple of Chinatown shops clearing out their stock of laser-discs at $10 a time, my hand-luggage was pretty solid on the way out. They made me put it on the scales, and it weighed a bit more than the 13 lb limit…okay, it was actually 25.8. “Too heavy,” they said. I take the laser-discs out, and hand the bag over. It’s weighed, and is deemed close enough to pass. I leave the desk, go round the corner…and put the laserdiscs back in my bag. I board the plane with no further difficulty.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this – on a previous occasion, I took stuff out of the offending case, and put it in my jacket pockets. Thus, honour was satisfied, the regulations were seen to be obeyed, and life proceded on after a slight annoyance. But you do have to wonder what the point is – why bother? I can understand an overall weight restriction covering all your baggage. I can even understand a volume restriction on hand luggage, since there’s a limited amount of space in the cabin. But within those limits, why should it matter whether your hand luggage weighs one pound or twenty? Of such things – the meaningless enforcement of petty regulations – are air-rages born. It’s interesting that the airlines put all blame for such things on the passengers, despite:

• banning smoking, leading to stressed-out nicotine addicts
• plying customers with drinks in a reduced-pressure atmosphere which enhances the effects of alcohol
• cutting back the air circulation to the bare minimum, especially in economy
• giving passengers – this is not an exaggeration – about two inches more room than slaves had while they were being shipped from Africa.

And slaves didn’t have to endure any Bette Midler movies either. Of course, there’s no excuse for berserk incidents involving passengers trying to open doors, and so on. But it might help if the airlines took some action to prevent the causes, as well as bleating about increasing punishments for the offenders.

[I’m off to New York this weekend – wheeeeee! – so the following piece from the Reuters wire seemed particularly appropriate. Within three months I’ll be living permanently in the country he describes… Can’t wait! :-)]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Morris Berman has a good idea what he will do if George W. Bush is elected U.S. president in November: run to the toilet and get sick at the thought that Americans could elect a man he calls “as dumb as a stick.” Berman says it is a tough call, but he thinks if Bush wins he would be the dumbest man ever to hold the highest office in the land. He does not believe the Texas governor has ever read an intellectually challenging book and sees him as the poster boy for everything that is wrong with an America where being an intellectual is taboo.

But then Berman has been pretty angst-ridden about America lately. The Johns Hopkins University teacher, who calls himself a Marxist idealist, has just published his latest book, The Twilight of American Culture, and his prognosis is bleak. Most people cannot read, never mind spell, he says. Bill Gates and his billionaire buddies seem to have all the money, while the greatest country on Earth, which used to export ideals like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, now flogs fried chicken and mind-numbing sitcoms. Spirituality is dead, Americans are Prozac-popping and directionless, families are falling apart and, even in the hallowed Oval Office, the business of nations has been put on hold for peccadilloes with interns.

It is a question of culture, of style as well as substance, and, for Berman at least, American culture is dead — if not totally dead, then twitching on the emergency-room floor with no health insurance and nary a doctor in sight. Berman sees Bush as the poster child for America’s collapse, which he likens to the fall of the Roman Empire. “I’m guessing George W. Bush has never read a serious book in his entire life. What does it say that we have a serious candidate for president in this country that is literally as dumb as a stick?” Berman asked rhetorically. “He can’t write a grammatical sentence and he can’t give a grammatical speech unless it’s written by somebody else and he’s reading it off a teleprompter. And the American public will probably elect him president.”

Berman, a fan of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, recalled a recent article in an Illinois newspaper that asked people if Bush was intelligent enough to be president. “One woman said, ‘He’s pretty smart, but he doesn’t know very much.’ She’s the perfect Bush voter, and there are millions of her out there,” he said in mock horror. Berman, who talks in a Woody Allen-like patter, recalled a litany of statistics from his book that point to the demise of America as a home for middle-class intellectuals: The number of people reading a daily newspaper has halved since 1965. A 1995 survey showed 40 percent of adults could not name America’s Second World War enemies. About 120 million Americans read and write English at no better than an 11-year-old’s level.

As for the popularity of self-help books, don’t get him started on that one. “Self-help books are essentially watered-down sayings on tea bags that have been made into books. Chicken Soup for the Soul — every other book is ‘the soul.’ Why did we get so preoccupied with the soul? Because we are so dumb we can’t think of anything else,” he said. But it was not always like this. Back in the 1960s, Berman believes, America was different: “There was an allegiance to the basic notion that somehow the United States was a force for good in the world, that it really was doing valuable things in terms of democracy and the economy,” he said. “Now there is a spiritual apathy and a feeling that regardless of who you elect the government is corrupt. It’s become materialism for its own sake, as if there were no other purpose in life except to make money.”

Part of the blame for reading and being an intellectual falling from grace in America can be laid at Hollywood’s doorstep, Berman said. “In the case of Cheers, all the people that have any intellectual interests whatsoever are portrayed as pompous, full of themselves and pretentious,” he said of the TV comedy that enjoyed huge ratings for more than a decade. And the people (in Cheers) who basically don’t know their ass from their elbow are warm and authentic and the real grit of America, but they basically can’t spell a word like pretentious correctly.”

America’s malaise is not something that can be remedied with a Band-Aid or even a brilliant president. Things have gone too far for that, Berman believes. He predicts America will fall into a deep economic depression leading to a “dark age” like none before. “Every civilization in the history of the world comes to an end. There are no exceptions,” he said. “We are not going to beat the odds, American hubris and optimism aside.” Is there no hope — not even a glimmer? No happy, Hollywood ending? “Twilight implies a dawn,” he said. “So in some ways this book is a clarion call to people to do acts of preservation of the culture and leave a memory trace that then will get picked up maybe 200 years from how in terms of a cultural revival.” But there is some consolation: He does not expect the dark age to start until late in this century when, thankfully, most of us will have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Never mind Big Brother watching us, at times it seems that we are all watching Big Brother. Or everyone else at least, since the fifteen minutes I’ve caught of it have failed to pique my interest in the slightest. On the TC entertainment scale, watching dull and irritating people attempt to learn semaphore falls slightly below shampooing the budgie. But I think it is very interesting from a social phenomena point of view: this morning, I missed my train to work, because I couldn’t believe that the breakfast news had a lengthy report on Nick’s eviction. And this wasn’t even on the home of the brain-damaged, the Big Breakfast, it was the BBC. Clearly Something is Going On.

I feel a certain parental interest, having raised a flag about Big Brother, in its Dutch incarnation, all the way back in December 1999. It was clear then that it had the potential to go supernova, and this has been the case wherever it has been shown. However, it’s obvious that – as usual – the tabloid press are building their own castles. Even if 5 million people are watching, that means 50 million of us have better things to do. Though it’s impossible to avoid. At least until the football season starts again, coffee-machine talk here revolves around the exploits of the not-so-magnificent seven…no, make that six. Even people who wouldn’t touch Eastenders or Coronation Street with someone else’s barge-pole are touting its merits because it’s “real”. I suggest they try watching WWF wrestling instead – it’s patently bleedin’ obvious that the people in the house are playing roles every bit as artificial as The Rock or Triple H.

The show has been condemned in some circles – usually liberal, bleeding-heart papers like The Guardian – as “cruel” or “voyeuristic” – and it may well be so. However, I have very little problem engaging in cruel voyeurism, under scientifically controlled conditions, of course – such is human nature. A couple of thousand years ago, we’d have gone down the Circus Maximus watching people fighting wild animals. Nowadays, we go down the multiplexus and watch Russell Crowe fight computer-generated wild animals. This is what they call progress. We all like to experience other people’s lives; however, if you can’t find anyone’s better than a lesbian ex-nun, you perhaps do need to get out a lot more.

Say what you like about the people in the house – and if that was “they’re a bunch of annoying bastards whom you’d actively avoid in the pub”, you’re probably close to the mark – they’re taking part of their own free will. It appears to be a shock to some commentators, but give people enough incentive, and they will do virtually anything. In this case, I don’t think the money is particularly important: indeed, it may even be counter-productive, since the real loonies would do it for free. And real loonies = good television. Indeed, The man behind Big Brother has already got his next show sorted: Chains of Love. In this, a woman selects four men from 100 prospects to be chained to her wrists and ankles for a week, before she selects her dream date.

The question is not whether people want to watch such shows, for there’s obviously a market. The question is more whether the authorities will let them. The main news story which Nick’s departure drove from the front pages was the sunk Russian submarine – imagine if it had cameras inside, and pictures were broadcast over the Internet, 24/7. Would it get high ratings figures? Would you watch, right up until the last breath flickered out? You may not like the answers to these questions.

On Monday, I quit my job. Regular readers will know this is no surprise, and has been in the pipeline for ages as part of plans to move across to America before the end of the year. But to finally hand over that sheet of paper to my boss was both simultaneously uplifting and scary. The former, because I can look forward to three months of…well, let’s just say that the threat of being sacked no longer has any great hold over me. But it’s sobering too, in that this is really the first irrevocable step towards departure. It’s one thing to talk about emigration; it’s quite another to take a leap into the dark and give up your employment for the past 11 years, without any idea what your next one will be.

The clock is now ticking, and I suddenly realised that I’d better get on with the next TC, before I lose access to all my spiffy hi-tech apparatus. The past week has thus been a bit of a blizzard of activity, as I start laying out some articles, hand over others to minions, and get stuck into reviewing material (no…please…not another Carmen Electra movie!). At the moment, I am optimistic, though perversely, I suspect that as the deadline of the end of my employment approaches, I’ll be spending more time in the office. I can see them carting me out of the building on October 31st, as I shriek, “Just five more minutes!” [And here seems as good a place as any to include the traditional mantra: “Oi, Lino! Where are the ‘zine reviews?”]

At least one potential distraction has been largely removed, as my Playstation appears to be succumbing to wear and tear (I’m sure it has nothing to do with the pique-induced slapping it took after a particularly irritating LMA Manager loss). From a TC point of view, this is good. However, having struggled through most of Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid, I feel an odd sense of loss that I’ll never get to finish them. There’s not much point in buying a new machine, given my imminent departure, and I have no interest in starting from the beginning again!

On the other hand, it will be one less item to ship. For I’m already looking (albeit in a vague way) at the prospect of packing all my stuff up. Fortunately, I don’t have much in the way of possessions – at least, not ones without plugs on the end – and most of what I do have, there’s no point in taking over. I like my bed, but my research suggests they have perfectly adequate ones in America. Apart from that, it’s mostly software of various forms, and will provide a good opportunity to engage in some hard-core pruning. For example, do I bother taking any LPs with me? Part of me is going “But…but…but I can’t leave them behind!”, while a rather more realistic part enquires politely when was the last time I even saw my record-player. Keeping stuff is all very well, but paying to ship it does concentrate the mind.

Especially as I’ve got a good seven years of accumulated junk to sort out, thanks to my non-nomadic lifestyle. When you move home frequently, there is inevitably regular winnowing of the dross. Not having this means entire rooms to be gone through and the dreck discarded (I’ve got most of the first 100 issues of Empire if anyone wants to come round and pick them up!). If previous experience is anything to go by, these sessions will degenerate into me sitting in the middle of a bomb-zone, reading books I’d forgotten I had, while listening to CDs that had fallen down behind said books. Actually, I’m quite looking forward to this…

“We gave away shillings and pence in 1971, then we had to switch from gallons to liters in 1995. Gradually we’ve been forced to give up Fahrenheit for Celsius.. Pounds and ounces we are going to keep.”
     — Tony Bennett, U.K. Independence Party

“This goes together with red buses and pillar boxes, warm beer and cricket. It’s what England is all about.”
     — Stephen Alambrites, Federation of Small Businesses spokesman

“If it’s good enough for Tony Blair to have his new baby weighed in pounds and ounces, then it’s good enough to sell fish in… We are losing our heritage. We’re being Europeanized through the back door. Pounds and ounces is just the tip of the iceberg, I tell you.”
     — Neil Herron, Sunderland fishmonger

Hello? Are we on drugs? I will admit to being a great fan of Europe in general, with its more relaxed attitude to anything from extended licencing hours to pornography. I have little time for the isolationists who would rather see us waving farewell, as an integrated Europe steams off into the third millennium. But even given this, comments like the ones above just leave me shaking me head in wonder: haven’t people got anything better to do with their time than campaign for the retention of a system of weights and measures that dates back to medieval times or beyond. Never mind the third millennium, some people seem to be having difficulty leaving the first one.

Imperial measures are an anachronism, borne out of an era when balance scales meant a base-16 system e.g. sixteen ounces in a pound meant for easy division, and measurements were based upon items like the length of the king’s arm or three “round and dry” barleycorns (for those unfamiliar with regal limbs or cereals, that’s the yard and inch). Nowadays there’s absolutely no reason for them to be this way: the decimal system is used for almost everything else figured in numbers save time, and there’s no doubt it makes calculation much easier.

However, the quotes above prove it is now also a symbol of Britishness, standing against the tide of centralised bureaucracy that is perceived as washing over us from Brussels and the rest of the Euronation. But, really, what difference does it make? We abandoned the rod, pole and perch without civilization collapsing into anarchy and chaos – though the small-minded probably blame that for the loss of the British Empire. I can see conceivable arguments for not joining the European Single Currency, but these depend on hardcore economics, rather than woolly bleating about losing our “Britishness”. As long as I get enough money to keep me in badfilm and curry, I don’t mind whether it’s paid to me in pounds, euros or sea-shells. And I care even less whether I get a pint of beer or 568 ml; it won’t taste the slightest bit different.

Until recently, the stance of this merry band of metric-martyrs seemed quaint and irrelevant. But recently, Tesco decided to tear down many of its recently introduced kilo signs and replace them with imperial measures as well, after a survey of 1,000 customers found that more than 50% found metric measurements “confusing”. And how will reverting to the old system help them cope? Wouldn’t helping them to learn to handle metric amounts have been more useful? But, hey, that wouldn’t have been worth so many jingoistic points in the tabloids. Sheesh, it’s bad enough when the government dances to the newspapers’ tune, but between this and the GM food panic, it seems the supermarkets want to boogie too.

I can’t help having a nasty suspicion that a large part of this hyper-resistance to metricity, which has been going on since an EU directive in the mid-80’s, is pure xenophobia. It’s a French system, created not long after the revolution there, and I suspect that if the British had come up with the idea, there wouldn’t be nearly as much resistance to it. Perhaps Napoleon was right when he said “England is a nation of shopkeepers”. He just forgot to add that they only use pounds and ounces.