Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released the week of my seventh birthday — to date my favourite (an affective fact unlikely to be challenged this year). Seven is the best number.

But it didn’t come into our family lives until a month later, my mum’s 32nd birthday, 4 July 1967. We were on holiday in mid-Wales, on a hillside farm owned by family friends (my godfather) a little up from Aberdyfi. Dad hadn’t joined us immediately — in those years he often had to travel to London from Shrewsbury for days on end, to attend work-related meetings. So he drove up a few days later — we were a two-mini family, very Italian Job in that one way at least — laden with presents for everyone, especially mum.

Mum’s was Sergeant Pepper, of course. And it went straight onto the ancient gramophone in that farmhouse, probably immediately damaging the surface (I bet the needle hasn’t been changed to this day). It was played non-stop the entire holiday — bearing mind that that summer was famously warm and clear-skied, and full of generational hope. My parents weren’t hippies — they were a bit too old and too cautious, dad was 36 that year — but they were caught up in the sense of possibility, working (and living) in a place staffed by young adults committed to natural-science fieldwork and what wasn’t yet widely known as ecology. My sister and I were brought up semi-communally in this space, often babysat by these many idealistic young adults. This summer has remained the perfect snapshot for me of that idealism.

The record itself — the physical object, the sleeve and the inner sleeve and the disc and the label — my sister and I scoured for all its loving, baffling details. The fact — which I know now and knew nothing of then — that this was a land-grab made by the artists (so hugely successful their sales were a not-be-sniffed proportion of the national GDP at a time when other sectors were struggling) to strip control of product-terrain, like sleeve space and label space and even the run-out groove, from EMI (who generally used the spaces to shill rival LPs or EMITEX record-wiping cloth or whatever) and place them at the whim of the musicians, to hire artists like Peter Blake or whoever. In terms of aesthetic decision-making and conceptual control this was a revolutionary and transformative move. (Of course many of the decisions subsequently made were quite poor: musicians are not always artistically smart in other realms than music, and the gatefold-sleeve has been rich in crimes against art.)

I could read at that age — my sister was five, I don’t remember if she could yet— and just loved that all these words were there, the lyric-printing a first, I believe, not that I knew this then, of course, or cared. I loved the bright acid-pop colours of the sleeve — I still own my parents’ copy and they’re still sharp and vivid and dense with memory. I loved the mystery of it: why were they dressed like this, what was the story, how did these scenes and anecdotes connect? I loved to read but was easily disoriented by children’s stories not working as convention demanded — the obvious strength of all this (as demonstrated by my parents’ enjoyment) presented me with a new way to present story material, which I didn’t quite get. This was as thrilling as it was strange: an invaluable sensation to learn in such a lovely context, I think. At least if you think puzzled curiosity is a good quality in a critic — certainly it’s a reaction I continue to favour.

We loved the Blake insert pop-art cut-outs, the moustaches and glasses: in fact we cut them out and donned them, and scampered round the garden in the sun with them (lots of scampering around in the s childhoods). Ruined for future collectors, perhaps — but this wasn’t about the future, it was about an utterly delighted present. And mum and dad enjoyed our delight.

It wasn’t actually such an easy year for them, though we didn’t then know that. Dad had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s the year before, unusually young at 35. In fact he had been given just ten years to live — the synthesis of L-Dopa (key study published 1968) would change this (he lived until 2010) but in 1967 only a tiny handful of researchers knew anything about L-Dopa. So in this sunniest of summers, mum and dad lived under a shadow of expected grief and trial, which — to my grown-up astonishment and admiration — they entirely kept from their children. I remember dad talking a little to me about no longer being able to draw well, or write — as a young man he had beautiful calligrapher’s penmanship, he and mum both, and was a gifted amateur artist, mainly drawing plants, with occasional gorgeously evocative Christmas cards and such. All that he had to give up (he had to teach himself to write with his left hand instead of his right). I don’t remember ever being told that he probably only had ten years to live — though I must have been, because if I think of it now, this feels like a fact I knew all my life. But I didn’t; I just suppressed the first moment I discovered it (which I think must have been after this summer holiday when I was only seven).

They hadn’t been pop enthusiasts much before this — I have one much earlier memory, of dancing in the staff dining room with other members of staff to “She Loves You” as it played on a transistor on a high window-ledge with the sun streaming in past it. But it was not mum and dad’s radio — and in our flat we really only listened to classical music on radio three now and then, and much more often to classical music on records. Dad had read the famous — infamous — review of Pepper in The Times, by its respected classical critic William Mann, and been impressed by Mann’s admiring approval. (I still have the cutting he kept, inserted into their copy.) As a family we owned the LPs after Pepper — the White Album and Abbey Road anyway — but none from before it.

My favourite track was — and still is — “Within You, Without You”. Dad’s was “Lovely Rita Meter Maid”. My sister can’t decide between “Lucy” (one of her iddle names), “She’s Leaving Home” and “A Day in the Life”. Mum’s was “When I’m 64” — she loved the line “Vera, Chuck and Dave”, especially the way Paul sings “Chuck”, and the sentiment too, certainly as coloured by this situation my sister and I knew nothing of then. She lived — it only occurs to me as I write this — to be 69: margaret s (1935-2005)

Which fact is poignant to me in ways that become so much sharper when suffused by all this. I once asked dad, years later, about what new music he and mum might like to listen to. “We don’t really want to listen to new music any more, Mark,” he said. “We want to listen to the old music.” (I wasn’t on ilx when my dad died, and never wrote it up there, maybe I should…)

Cross-posted on ilx, where this evolved as a response someone asking which the best song on the record is — but I can’t separate it from all this flood of memory; both are wound much too deep in the making of me, and I find it literally senseless thinking about such a ranking, it’s just tooo far from how I first experienced the LP.

Poll finds twice as many saying they’ll vote tactically

The above poll by BMG for the Electoral Reform Society, is striking because when exactly the same question was asked by the same pollster before GE2015 just 9% said they were ready to vote tactically.

The total of 200% seems high but could reflect partly UKIP not standing in many seats and also the situation facing the LDs is nothing like it was at the end of the coalition. Far fewer LAB voters were ready to switch to the yellows to stop the blues which made it easier for Cameron’s Tories to pick up 27 LD held seats.

Quite what the impact will be like this time is hard to guess like all matters in relation to this election. It is in these final few days that many decisions like his will be made. We might see vote swapping which is what I did last time and will do so on Thursday. My vote will be in Twickenham while I’ll be voting in Bedford according to what the person there wants me to do.

My overall sense is that there’s no great desire out there to give TMay the landslide that looked likely just a couple of weeks ago.

Tactical voting looks set to take place in all sorts of ways. In the 56 seats the SNP is defending in Scotland the unionist party that looks best able to win might benefit. Elsewhere it could the the standard anti-CON or anti LAB factors that determine the votes.

Lots of polls due out overnight and I’ll put a thread up later.

Mike Smithson

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You know when you’re trying to think of a way to describe how things are going in the election as things turn a little weird and then someone hits the perfect metaphor? That:

Chris, this is not the time for sober analysis. This is the stage where every1 gets to play w the infinite improbability drive for a while.

— Declan Gaffney (@djmgaffneyw4) May 31, 2017

I know I promised back at the start of this diary, all those weeks ago, that I wouldn’t spend it following 2015 into the dark corners of polling obsessions but YouGov threw out a little hand grenade of a projection last night, suggesting that things might be about to get weird on us. Rather than putting the Tory majority in the ‘how far back do we have to go to find a comparison?’ range, it instead suggested they might lose seats (and their majority) while Labour would gain to put us firmly in hung Parliament territory. The interesting thing about this was that it wasn’t based on applying a uniform national swing across constituencies but instead looking at how different demographics have said they would vote and then working that out constituency by constituency. It’s a controversial method, that didn’t come up with the right projection for the US Presidential election in the elecoral college last year, but it would be something that produced contrary results to other pollsters if this is a realigning election where there’s mass movement of voters between parties. If that happens, then it will make election night very interesting as results won’t be easily predictable by extrapolating from the first few.

It also offers up the joyous prospect of the Tories gaining votes while losing seats. If any of them were to then complain about this as being an injustice and the voters not being properly represented, I may well die laughing.

Of course, this is the point in election campaigns where people can get over-excited and all sorts of wild speculation can break out. It’s where people spend time debating whether the Edstone will need planning permission to be erected in the Number 10 garden, where we wonder which Liberal Democrat candidates might be able to be appointed straight to ministerial office in the Clegg government or any other number of scenarios that seem likely in the heated air of an election campaign, then afterwards are forgotten about as everyone remembers that the result was the one they predicted and expected all along. It’s a national outbreak of candidatitis, sweeping out from party activists to infect the whole country, then disappearing some time around 10pm next Thursday.

And if a wild projection wasn’t enough to excite you, the country – or that bit of it that obsesses over politics on social media, at least – has got debate fever. Yes, tonight is the BBC election debate, which has been suddenly made an event of interest by Jeremy Corbyn today announcing that he would appear in it having previously said he wouldn’t. This means the Conservatives will now be the only party there without a leader representing them as Amber Rudd will be standing in for Theresa May while the Prime Minister goes off to speak to a small rally of Tory activists in a carefully sanitised warehouse somewhere off the M4. Sorry, I meant campaign and ‘meet the people’ because luckily, she’s not campaigning for a job that occasionally requires you to meet in public and debate with other people.

It’s a clever move by Corbyn, as he does have the momentum in the head to head battle and unless he breaks down and declares ‘all power to the Soviets!’ in the middle of the debate (not that quoting Lenin is necessarily harmful nowadays) he can continue to disarm the Tory strategy against him. They’ve been painting him as a crazed Marxist revolutionary wanting to bring down the system, but his recent appearances (especially against Paxman) have been more sardonic history teacher who the students love because he keeps going off on tangents in lessons and never sets any homework. Everyone’s now frantically re-preparing their tactics and points for tonight, which might even make it interesting. That’s why I’m writing this beforehand, when it might still be interesting, rather than afterwards when the reality sets in and commentators intone ‘we are all Ruddites now’.

As ever, we shall conclude with Election Leaflet Of The Day which today comes from an interesting independent – Tim Lord, standing in Cities of London and Westminster. Like many independents he has one big issue he’s standing on but his is an interesting case of the national becoming local in a distinct constituency. ‘Voted Remain? Vote for Tim.’ is his message, pointing out that the Cities’ current MP, Mark Field, is signed up to May’s Brexit strategy, and as it’s a place with lots of interests in maintaining close ties with the EU, he’s hoping that will motivate them to switch to him. (This article spells it out in more depth) It could be an interesting tactic that delivers a shock, it could be yet another damp squib, but it makes a usually safe seat somewhat interesting.

Eight days left until activists who’ve been up since the crack of dawn gird themselves for a push at reminding people getting home from work that it’s time to go vote.

The front page of The Times made me say a phrase that rhymes with 'clucking bell' pic.twitter.com/p6f9QtQfZc

— TSE (@TSEofPB) May 30, 2017

Tonight: we reveal YouGov's first seat by seat projection of the campaign – suggests Tories fall 16 seats short of overall majority pic.twitter.com/8ouPRHTZ7m

— Sam Coates Times (@SamCoatesTimes) May 30, 2017

Tonight's YouGov data, which will be updated daily between now and polling day, based on complex model and 7,000 sample over 7 days pic.twitter.com/MzpXXifBFX

— Sam Coates Times (@SamCoatesTimes) May 30, 2017

If you YouGov are accurate then Mrs May will be announcing her resignation in 10 days time

I’ve never known anything like it. Such divergent figures from two pollsters, this is the sort of stuff that destroys reputations. YouGov had the Tory lead in the 20s a few weeks, if Mrs May does lose her majority then she really will be the worst Tory leader in history. To lose David Cameron’s majority against Corbyn, that’s just shocking, but after GE2015, Brexit, and Trump, we should learn not to take anything for granted.

I have doubts about these findings from YouGov because it doesn’t match up with the supplementaries/leader ratings.

No one can accuse the pollsters of herding at this election.

TSE

Update

@thetimes @SamCoatesTimes For the sceptics: this model was publicly tested during the EU referendum and it always had Leave ahead: https://t.co/JHbqbg3wYM pic.twitter.com/UHnFHVlF9I

— Peter Yeung (@ptr_yeung) May 30, 2017

YouGov/Times VI poll (conducted over the last week)

Con 42 (-1) Lab 38 (+2) LD 9 (nc) UKIP 4 (nc)

Changes from their Sunday Times poll.

— TSE (@TSEofPB) May 30, 2017

In the City, business leaders talk of his paper as “the unofficial opposition”. As arguably the best informed critic of a Conservative Prime Minister who he intensely dislikes, he has common cause with Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan, whose election as London Mayor the pre-Osborne Standard opposed. It is an extraordinary turn of events.

• Tories so worried about Corbyn becoming PM that they gave us the opportunity to make that happen when they didn't need to. 
• Tories think someone who has shown herself to be awful at just about everything since she became PM will be the best person to negotiate the most important deal in our country's history
• Tories want us to pay, pay, pay but will tell us all they are the party that supports low taxation and "hard-working families".

Increasingly, stars who have the clout to do so without creating empty seats at their live performances are banning cameras, cellphones and other recording devices. If you buy tickets for Chris Rock's current tour, you will be confronted with this alert…

No cellphones, cameras or recording devices will be allowed at Chris Rock's Total Blackout Tour. Upon arrival, all phones and smart watches will be secured in Yondr pouches that will be unlocked at the end of the show. Guests maintain possession of their phones throughout the night, and if needed, may access their phones at designated Yondr unlocking stations in the lobby. All guests are encouraged to print their tickets in advance to ensure a smooth entry process. Anyone caught with a cellphone in the venue will be immediately ejected. We appreciate your cooperation in creating a phone-free viewing experience.

I've been trying to figure out how I feel about this. In recent years, there have been times when I felt I had to be reachable — by my mother or her doctors when she was failing or because my friend Carolyn might need me, again for medical reasons. Cell phones made that possible.

Thinking out loud now…

When I've been in a show the last ten or so years, there have been many times when my phone vibrated to announce a call. I'd sneak a quick peek at the screen, shielding it so its light wouldn't distract anyone around me. 95% of the time, it was not a call that paramedics were en route to my mother's house or that Carolyn needed me urgently at the nursing facility…so I could ignore the call and direct my attention back to the stage. Quick, easy, unobtrusive.

But if my phone had been in a Yondr bag, I couldn't have taken the chance that it wasn't an emergency call. Not only would I have been derelict in my duty as a friend and loved one, but I wouldn't have been able to focus on the show. I would have been sitting there worrying the call was important. So I would have had to get up and unless I'd scored an aisle seat, crawl across people — "Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me" — greatly inconveniencing them twice (once going out, once coming back) to go out and check.

That doesn't sound very good for me, my loved ones or the audience members around me. I guess I would have not gone to the show.

I'm not, by the way, questioning that the performing venue or the performers have the right to require this, unless maybe I'm not warned before I buy my ticket. I'm just trying to figure out what it means to me.

I'm also thinking about when my friend Amber and I went to see Idina Menzel at the Greek Theater a few weeks ago. From the time we got to our seats to the time the show started was more than 49 minutes and we were far from the first people to take our seats. Many people were there more than an hour. We passed some of our wait time on our phones, including practical things like figuring out where we were going to go to dinner after the show and getting the answers to a few questions that arose from conversation. Yondr doesn't just take your phone away from you during a show. It takes it away from you before the show and during intermission.

So I'm wondering if at a show that requires Yondr pouches, ticketholders delay going to their seats and then there's a mad crush, just before the entertainment commences.

Even so, I guess I'm okay with it but a few other things bother me, mostly in the realm of justifications for it. I read a lot of articles and watched several videos in which artists and promoters using Yondr defended it by saying it was for our own good. They're helping us break our unhealthy addiction to our cellphones or "You'll enjoy the show much more if you don't watch it through your phone." It's kind of insulting that you're presuming to decide that for me…

…and it's not even the real reason. The real reason is you don't want me putting pieces of your show up on YouTube.

And I'm fine with that, too. I think the Internet is a tidal wave of copyright infringement and I'm all for controlling that when the proprietors want it controlled. Some are fine with it. Some regard it as good promotion or a part of what we're paying for. (Then again: If the star engages in some copyright infringement of his own — say, it's a comedian and he does a big hunk of someone else's act — they don't want that to be recorded and used in a lawsuit. Or if the star pulls a Michael Richards and starts spouting racist crap or otherwise does something career-damaging. They're trying to prevent that from going viral.)

This isn't a big issue and it's only a temporary one at that because any day now, someone will come up with other technology to deal with this. Performance venues may have "jamming" beams that will prevent video or audio recording on the premises. Or there may be some app which you can install and it will prove to a guy at the door as you enter than you've disabled recording on your phone for the next X hours. Or something else.

But it's a little issue for now and I hope that if I go to a show where they require this, they don't keep us waiting an hour before they start. And I wish they'd be more honest about why they're doing it. It's not for our own good as audience members. It's for their own good as entrepreneurs protecting their product.

The post Way Out Yondr appeared first on News From ME.

Flashback Friday. 

Responding to critics who argue that poor people do not choose to eat healthy food because they’re ignorant or prefer unhealthy food, dietitian Ellyn Satter wrote a hierarchy of food needs. Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it illustrates Satter’s ideas as to the elements of food that matter first, second, and so on… starting at the bottom.

The graphic suggests that getting enough food to eat is the most important thing to people. Having food be acceptable (e.g., not rotten, something you are not allergic to) comes second. Once those two things are in place, people hope for reliable access to food and only then do they begin to worry about taste. If people have enough, acceptable, reliable, good-tasting food, then they seek out novel food experiences and begin to make choices as to what to eat for instrumental purposes (e.g., number of calories, nutritional balance).

As Michelle at The Fat Nutritionist writes, sometimes when a person chooses to eat nutritionally deficient or fattening foods, it is not because they are “stupid, ignorant, lazy, or just a bad, bad person who loves bad, bad food.”  Sometimes, it’s “because other needs come first.”

Originally posted in 2010; hat tip to Racialicious; cross-posted at Jezebel.

(View original at https://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Apologies for the dearth of comics lately, folks. This one is exceptionally silly, but it’s been on my mind :-p

And we’re back.

One thing that I’ve been thinking about with this election is whether there are any other elections it resembles and if those give us a clue to what the final result would be. Political scientists like finding things that are broadly comparable for two reasons: first, we can use different outcomes to measure the effects of small changes in other variables, and second, we get to pretend that all that reading about previous elections that we’ve done was of important academic significance, not just indulging in a psephological hobby. So, here are three other elections that this one may or may not resemble. Bonus points for guessing which one it’s most like before we get to see the answers of June 9th.

(And a reminder that the prediction competition is still open, if you’re interested in scoring meaningless points)

My favourite Liberal slogan made its appearance in 1974.

This was the last time a Prime Minister decided to call a snap election, and unlike this one, Edward Heath went for a very quick one with just three weeks between him telegraphing the Queen (she was in New Zealand) to ask for a dissolution of Parliament and the election date. Heath called the election in the midst of a series of industrial disputes and the three-day week to ask the electorate to decide ‘who governs Britain?’ He wanted a strong majority and electoral mandate to take on the unions and thought he could get the people to rally round him. When it came to the crunch the electorate’s answer to the question was more on the lines of ‘not sure, but probably not you’. Heath had over a year left before he had to call an election, but wanted to get a new mandate to take on a difficult task – will May’s search for one lead to the same result.

1983: The closest thing to khaki

An economy coming out of recession. An election a year after the UK was at the centre of a major world event. A female Conservative Prime Minister ready to decisively shift her party in a new direction versus a Labour Party led by a veteran left-winger despised by the press. So far, so similar, except for the bit that’s missing. This time we didn’t get the proclaimed moderate wing of the Labour Party splitting off under a leader recently returned from a high-profile foreign role, and the Labour Party has remained vaguely united and on-message during the campaign. (There has been some sniping, but it’s equivalent to the attacks from within May faced over the dementia tax) It’s not identical to 1983, but is the best chance we’re going to get to have an idea of what might have happened there without the SDP? When things look like they’re shaping up into a classic two-party fight, what happens to the centrist voters when they’re the ones who get squeezed?

2004: The blame game

Not a British election this time, but one in Spain, which was the last time a major terrorist incident (the Atocha bombings) happened during a European election campaign. Before the bombings, the incumbent right-wing government had a comfortable polling lead over their left-wing opponents but by the time the election came around three days later, they were defeated and the left won a surprise victory. One of the principal factors behind that was the Aznar government completely mishandling the response to the bombings, by insisting the Basque separatist movement ETA was behind it when it was eventually revealed to have been done by Islamists. However, it does show that the electorate won’t necessarily rally round the government in a time of crisis, and the shift in voting behaviour caused by a major event isn’t easily predictable.

So, three previous elections, three possible scenarios that we could be playing out right now, or something entirely new and different might be happening. Thirteen days till we find out.

Ben Carson, our HUD Secretary of somewhat dubious expertise, recently burbled on about how he thinks that “poverty, to a large extent, is a state of mind,” a statement which earned him some well-justified push-back and which prompted several people, knowing of my general thoughts about poverty, to wonder if I had any thoughts on the matter.

My thought on poverty in the United State being a “state of mind” is that what it really is, to a rather larger extent, is a lack of access — to money, to education, to opportunities, to adequate housing, to networks of expertise and help, among many other things, and most importantly (and as often a consequence of all the others noted and more) to the margin of safety that people who are not in poverty have when any individual thing knocks them off their stride.

It’s the last of these, in my opinion, that illustrates the gormlessness of Carson’s thoughts on poverty. You can have the most can-do spirit in the world, but your state of mind doesn’t mean jack when confronted with, say, a broken-down car you can’t afford to repair, which means that you can’t get to your job, which means that the job goes out the window, putting you at risk of not being able to pay the rent (or other bills), increasing the possibility of putting your family out on the street, making it more difficult for your kids to get and maintain an education. Your “can-do” spirit doesn’t mean shit to a worn-out timing belt or transmission. Your “can-do” spirit doesn’t mean shit to the landlord who decides to raise a rent you can barely afford, because he knows he can get more from someone else. Your “can-do” spirit doesn’t mean shit to the ice outside your home you slip and fracture your arm on when you head off to your second job. Your state of mind is not telekinetic. It can’t fix things that are out of your control, and which by dint of poverty you have no immediate way of addressing. When you’re poor, so many things are out of your control.

Conversely, if you have margin, your “state of mind” matters even less — because you have the ability to address problems as they arise. It doesn’t matter what my state of mind is if my car stops working; I can afford to have it taken to the shop and fixed. My state of mind is not relevant when I crack my arm; I have good health insurance with a low deductible. My state of mind is neither here nor there to my housing situation; my mortgage is paid off. My margin is considerable and will be regardless of what state my mind is in.

Yes, you might say, but you, John Scalzi, have an industrious state of mind! Well, that’s debatable (more on that later), but even if it is true, is it more industrious than the person who works two shitty jobs because they have no other choice? Am I more industrious than, say, my mother, who cleaned people’s houses and worked on a telephone exchange while I was growing up, so that I could eat and have a roof over my head? My mother, who barely cracked a five-figure salary while I grew up, worked as hard as hell. Tell me her “state of mind” was less industrious than mine is now, and I’ll laugh my ass off at you. Tell me any number of people in the small, blue-collar town I live in, who make significantly less than I do, and who are one slip on the ice away from tumbling down the poverty hole, have a “state of mind” substantially less industrious than my own, and I’ll likely tell you to go fuck yourself.

I happen to be one of those people who went from poverty to wealth, and because I am, I can tell you where “state of mind” lies on the list of things that have mattered in getting me where I am. It is on the list, to be sure. But it’s not number one. Number one is access to opportunity, which I got when my mother — not me — decided to chance having me apply to Webb, a private boarding school that cost more than she made in a year (I was a scholarship kid), with immense resources that allowed me entree into a social stratum I might not have otherwise had access to.

Number two is a network of people — mostly teachers at first — who went out of their way to foster me and nurture my intellect and creativity when they saw it in me. Number three is luck: being in the right place at the right time more than once, whether I “deserved” the break I was getting or not. Number four is my creativity, my own innate talents, which I then had to cultivate. Number five are the breaks I got in our culture that other people, who are not me, might not have gotten. Number six would be Krissy, my wife and my partner in life, who has skills and abilities complementary to mine, which has made getting ahead easier and building out our family’s margins much simpler than if I had to do it on my own.

Number seven — not even in the top five! — I would say is my “state of mind,” my desire and determination to make something of myself. And let’s be clear: this “state of mind” has not been an “always on” thing. There have been lots of times I was perfectly happy to float, or fuck around, or be passive, because times and opportunities allowed me to be so. There have been times when I have been depressed or apathetic and not interested in doing anything, and I didn’t — but still got along just fine because of my margin of safety. There have been times I have been overwhelmed and barely able to make any decisions at all. “State of mind” is a changeable thing, and importantly can be deeply influenced by one’s own circumstances. It’s much easier to have a positive “state of mind” when you know that no one thing is likely to knock your entire life askew. It’s easier not to give in to fatalism when not everything has the potential to ruin everything else. It’s easier to not feel like nothing you do matters, when you have the ability to solve many of your problems with a simple application of money.

I have seen people with what I’m sure Carson would describe as the correct “state of mind” fail over and over again because their legs are kicked out from under them in one way or another, and who never seem to make it no matter how hard they try. I’ve seen people who definitely don’t have the right “state of mind” succeed and even thrive — have seen them fail upward — because on balance other things broke their way. “State of mind” as a predictive factor of economic mobility is, bluntly, anecdotal bullshit, something to pull out of your ass while ignoring the mountains of evidence showing that economic mobility in the United States is becoming more difficult to come by. It’s not “state of mind” that’s the issue. It’s long-term systematic inequality, inequality that’s getting worse as we go along. Ignoring or eliding the latter and pinning poverty “to a large extent” on the former means you’re giving everyone and everything else that contributes to poverty in the United States — from racism to inertia to greed — a free pass.

I’m well aware that Carson has his own anecdotal rags-to-riches story, as I do; we both even have mothers who sacrificed for us so we could succeed. Good for him! I applaud him and his effort to get where he is now. But this doesn’t make his story any more than what it is, or what mine is — a single story, not necessarily easily replicated at large. Certainly my story isn’t easily replicated; not every poor kid can be given a break by a private boarding school catering to the scions of wealth and privilege. I think it’s fine if Carson or anyone else wants to lecture or opine on the poverty “state of mind.” But until and unless our country makes an effort to address all the other long-term issues surrounding poverty, Carson’s opinion on the matter is bullshit.

Control for opportunity. Control for access. Control for margin. And then come back to me about “state of mind,” as it regards poverty. I’ll be waiting, Dr. Carson.

Gran who suffered heart attack at job centre was too scared to leave as she feared losing benefits

Yep. UK government war on sick and poor continues.
(tags: ukpolitics )

The party is advising candidates tonight that, while national campaigning remains suspended, local campaigning can resume tomorrow.

• At the top of my hawking tower
• A hard border

Neil Anderson wrote me and said…

I assume you're going to write something about Don Rickles at some point, and was wondering if you'd discuss the two issues of Jimmy Olsen by Jack Kirby where Don Rickles guest-starred. I was confused by those stories, because it seemed like a natural that there would be a scene where Don Rickles meets Superman, and spends a few pages cleverly insulting him, but no such scene appears. Instead, there's this weird plot involving an evil twin of Don Rickles. I didn't know what to make of it at the time, and still don't. I'd be interested to know your thoughts.

I received quite a few questions about this even though I think I've written about it at least a dozen times. Here's a quick overview of what happened. This is from the big, exhaustive (and exhausting) biography of Jack that I've been writing and which I'm now able to finish. Which I will do soon…

The most famous plotline in Jimmy Olsen was probably a two-parter that guest-starred insult comedian Don Rickles. The event had originated with a suggestion from Steve Sherman and myself that Rickles — who boasted he "never picked on a little guy, only on the biggies" — make a brief cameo and insult Superman. After all, who was a bigger biggie than Superman?  Jack liked the idea and permission was procured from Rickles via his publicist for what was then planned as a sequence of but a page or two. At Jack's request, Steve and I wrote a batch of suggested Rickles lines. One went like this…

Rickles: "Hey, where you from, Big Boy?"

Superman: "I'm from the planet Krypton."

Rickles: "Just my luck. I got insults for every nationality on this planet. I gotta run into a yo-yo from Krypton!"

Then DC's own publicists decided that this presented an opportunity for promotion in other venues, and Kirby was asked to do two whole issues with Rickles, both to feature him prominently on their covers. One of those covers would display what cartoonist Scott Shaw has called the greatest line of ad copy ever done in comics: "Kirby says…Don't ask, just buy it!" The resultant issues were weird but wonderful, though Jack somehow never got around to actually having Rickles meet or insult Superman.

The comedian himself was less than thrilled by it all. He'd agreed to a cameo without remuneration, and felt exploited when it turned into two cover-featured guest appearances. He was further offended by a request from a DC publicist who presumed Rickles would gladly take the comics onto talk shows and promote them. Years later in an appearance on Conan O'Brien's NBC talk show, Rickles was less than delighted when the host hauled out a copy of the comic book and asked him about it. "Put that away," he said. "I had nothing to do with that."

Someone on the 'net recently wrote that it all came about because Rickles was a friend and neighbor of the Kirbys. I don't know where they got that because Don Rickles and Jack Kirby lived fifty miles apart and never met unless, of course, they have since Rickles passed away.

For what it's worth, I really like those issues. Liked them at the time when Jack did them, like them more now…and I think I like them for the exact same reasons that some people don't: Because they don't read like "normal" DC Comics or like what we longtime DC readers had come to expect when we picked up an issue of Jimmy Olsen. I sometimes wish Jack — and this goes for a lot of other folks in comics, past and present — could have been freed by some notion of what a DC or Marvel comic "should" be like. This applies to self-imposed restrictions as much as those dictated by editorial folks. The closer Jack got to doing that, the more successful his work was both financially and creatively. But he could have gotten even closer, especially when he was in full command of his creative powers.

The post From the E-Mailbag… appeared first on News From ME.

I haven’t been sleeping very well recently. Generally, I wake up at about half past three in the morning and then spend the next few hours trying and failing to get back to sleep. It happened this morning and I ended up thinking about Poppets. 

When I was kid, I used to go to an indoor water park called Water Palace in Croydon. On the way there, you’d go past the Paynes Poppets factory. It was a huge factory where they made Poppets. As you approached, the air would begin to smell of chocolate. It was very exciting. 

I started to think of all the people employed in the factory. The people in charge of ordering the ingredients. The people who checked that the machines were working properly. The people who cleaned the toilets. The people who managed the warehouse. The people who drove the fork lift trucks. People at every stage. People having serious meetings about Poppets. 

Then I began to think about all the other people. The kids at the nearby schools whose parents worked in the factory. The pubs where the workers drank. The hairdressers whose customers worked making Poppets. This whole Poppet universe. 

And then I thought that they’re just Poppets. I’ve maybe had Poppets three times in my life. All that effort for a box of Poppets. I started thinking about how this is true for everything. Not just Poppets. Mini Cheddars and toothbrushes and AA batteries and minced lamb and screw drivers and party hats and tins of beans and Sudocrem. There’s all this stuff and all these people. And I started to feel a bit giddy so I stopped thinking about Poppets and played Two Dots instead.

I told this story to someone the other day and they said, "Hey, you should put that on your blog." Okay, so here it is on my blog. It might not be the best anecdote I've told here but it is guaranteed to be 100% Trump-Free…

I have written here about my friend Bridget, a very lovely actress-dancer who for some reason was willing to  go out with me for a few years in the late seventies and early eighties. That's Bridget on the left in the photo above, in which we were all trying to pretend we were posing for a soup ad. The lovely blonde lady on the right is Linda Hoxit, another actress-dancer who was a friend of Bridget's. The pic is from one afternoon when for some reason, they decided to come over and make me lunch, which is not what this anecdote is about. It is, however, from around this time…

In addition to acting and dancing, Bridget sometimes earned money as a model. Her biggest gig was a few years as a Nexxus Hair Care Girl but there were others. Two or three times a year f'ristance, she would spend a day or two being photographed for the catalog of a very popular seller of sexy lingerie. The pay was pretty good and there was a bonus in that the models were allowed to take home the remnants of any outfits which were destroyed in the process.

As she explained to me, to make the lingerie fit perfectly and to enhance how it enhanced the figure, she would sometimes be sewn into the garments along with much judiciously-placed padding. They didn't do this with bras and panties but anything that covered much of the body would have had most of its seams removed before the shoot. The photo stylist and dresser would literally construct that kind of lingerie on the models' bodies, using a hand-held sewing device to baste this and sew that and tighten everything where they wanted it to be tight. When they were done, it would be necessary to literally cut her out of it.

Usually, everyone was in a hurry to get onto the next item to be modeled but sometimes, there was time for Bridget to perform some deft surgery and free herself from a garment without totally destroying it. Later, she could re-sew it so it could be worn again — and the last thing she wore, she could wear home and take all the time in the world to get it off.

Naturally though, one does not drive home in a something black and lacey — though she and another model once discussed whether it would help if they got pulled over by the police or make the pulling-over more likely. Bridget thought it would make it more likely so she would arrive at each shoot dressed in a pair of baggy sweats. She'd look over the rack of lingerie she'd be modeling and select the one she wanted to keep most intact, then she would get the photographer to agree to do that one last. Once those pics were taken and she was done for the day, she could put the sweats on over the selected item, wear it home and carefully remove the temporary stitching.

Upon arrival at one session, her selection was instantaneous. Among the pieces she'd be wearing was a red satin bustier. Actually, she called it a bustier but I would have called it a corset. In fact, I did and whenever I called it a corset, Bridget said, "No, no…it's a bustier!" By any name, it was gorgeous and hand-made and covered with lace and jewels and gold piping and it was very expensive. The corset bustier was $2000 in 1985 and if the company is still making 'em, it's probably more than twice that by now. It looked great on its own and even better with Bridget in it and I'm kicking myself that I didn't take any photos of her wearing it.

Just trust me. Stunning.

It looked something like one of these.

She came over and I took a pair of nail scissors and an X-Acto knife and ever-so-carefully began removing stitches. This may sound like a fun pastime and I guess it was for about the first three minutes. After ten, my index finger and thumb were aching from the scissors. After twenty, it was agony. I did get a brief intermission when the phone rang. I said to whoever was phoning, "I can't talk to you now. I'm cutting a beautiful model out of her underwear." Saying that was the only fun part of the experience.

But we got it off her without doing too much damage to it. Bridget took it home and sewed up the parts of it that were supposed to be sewed-up and — voila! — she had herself a $2000 bustier — or as I put it, a $2000 corset. Sweet. A few weeks later, it got even sweeter.

She got a call to go audition for a part in a commercial for some brand of ale. The commercial was set in a saloon in the old west and Bridget was trying out to play a dance hall girl. She put on the thing I called a corset and she called a bustier, put her sweats on over it and went to the audition.

All the other ladies there to audition had dressed up real fancy and they were baffled by the one in the waiting room who had shown up in unflattering, baggy sweats. Then when it was Bridget's turn, she went into the room where the casting was done, pulled off the sweats and instantly got the part. The producer said, "You're our girl if you wear that — what do you call it? A corset?"

She said, "Yes, yes…it's a corset!" If I'd been hiring her, she would have let me call it that, too. So she wore the red satin whatever-it-was in the commercial when it was filmed and made about a thousand dollars.

The commercial was edited and shown to Arthur, the man who owned the ale company for his approval. He loved it but, alas, someone didn't. That would be Arthur's lady friend who was there when it was screened. She loudly announced, "Arthur, we have to talk!" Then she took him to one side and demanded to know, in a voice so loud with outrage that all could hear it, "Why didn't you have me play the dance hall girl?" She was young enough and lovely enough that she could have but the folks who made the commercial didn't know of her at the time and her wealthy male friend Arthur hadn't thought to suggest/demand it.

For days after, the argument continued and all his apologies and gift offers couldn't placate his lady love. She kept demanding that the commercial be reshot with her in lieu of Bridget, and after a week or so of withheld sex and angry and/or tearful upset, Arthur gave in. He called the agency that had made the commercial and said, "I know it'll cost me a lot of money but reshoot the spot with Helga" — or whatever her name was — "as the dance hall girl." And he added, "Oh — and she insists she absolutely must wear that same red corset thing."

So Bridget got a call. "We have to reshoot," they told her and she thought, "Oh boy! I get to make another thousand dollars." Then they explained they weren't going to use her. They just needed to borrow the corset.

"You can't have it," she said defiantly. "It's mine and I'm the only one who wears it. And by the way, it's a bustier."

They said they'd pay her the same fee again, plus she'd still receive whatever residuals might be paid when the ad aired. She said no. They offered her $1500. She said no.

They offered two thousand dollars. She said, "Let me get this straight. You want to pay me twice as much to not be in the commercial as you paid me to be in the commercial?" They said yes. She thought for a second and said, "Make it $2500 and you've got a deal." They agreed. Bridget was blonde but she was in no way stupid, except occasionally in her choice of male companions.

So a week later, Bridget was on the set again but only to keep an eye on her beloved bustier. Not only was Helga (or whatever her name was) there to wear it but Arthur was there to watch the love of his life make her acting debut. Helga looked fine in the bustier and Bridget, who'd emotionally committed to being a good, well-compensated sport about it, admitted that Helga was fine in the part.

After they wrapped, Helga herself carried the bustier on its hanger over to Bridget, who was going to drop it off at the dry cleaner's on her way home. Helga thanked her and said, "They told me they paid you again for it so look at it this way. We each got a thousand dollars for wearing it and you made another thousand for loaning it to us."

Bridget said, "Well, to be honest, they paid me $2500 to let you wear it." And as she left with it, she could hear Helga storming across the studio and yelling, "Arthur, we have to talk!"

The post The Red Satin Bustier appeared first on News From ME.

"West is the target. It's where we think we can do well. 

"We are huge underdogs. We are outnumbered, we are outmatched but we are like the 300 Spartans. 

"We are fewer but we are better."

The Tories have accused a national pro-EU pressure group of trying to 'skew the vote' in the battle for Leicester West. 

Conservative candidate Jack Hickey has raised concerns about Open Britain's aim to get anti-Brexit supporters to travel to the constituency in the run up to the election on June 8 to support Labour's Liz Kendall who is defending a majority of just over 7,000. 

Open Britain itself says it is not trying to skew the vote but simply campaigning against what it describes as a 'a hard, destructive Brexit'

There’s an assumption politicians often make that they are perfectly in tune with the electorate. Elections are often a way of finding out whether or not this is true and seeing just who knows best bout what the electorate wants, but underlying this on all sides is an assumption that the political awareness of politicians and the electorate has the same cultural base. One of the more interesting side-effects of this was in the last election where the debates featured numerous politicians talking about austerity and its effects, and the resulting effect that one of Google’s most popular searches in the UK was ‘what is austerity?’ as a large amount of the viewing audience had no idea what they were talking about.

The same thing comes about with politicians (along political commentators and, to be fair, academics) assuming that everyone has the same detailed knowledge about the history of politics that they do, and so can easily remember the swing in their constituency in 2001, and the key slogans that were being used in that election, when a lot of people have trouble remembering what constituency they’re in (let alone council ward) and even when the last election took place. Nowhere is this level of political nostalgia revealed than in the field of billboard posters. So, when Labour released their new poster this morning, the commentariat were quick to go ‘ah-ha, it’s a homage to an old Tory poster’ because they remember this sort of thing. Meanwhile, any member of the public seeing it is more likely to wonder just how someone is wearing three boxing gloves at once, rather than having any memory of seeing something similar twenty-five years ago.

(Whether any member of the public ever sees 90% of posters that are ‘unveiled’ by parties is an interesting question, given that most of them only exist as images for press conferences and the occasional poster van that does a couple of circuits of Westminster before heading off to hawk something more profitable.)

There is continuing trend in political campaigns to launch advertising campaigns that are somehow a response to something that happened years or even decades ago (consider how many times people have referenced the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster) and it’s definitely a new phenomenon. I can’t recall anyone’s 1992 election campaign featuring posters that referenced election campaigns from the mid-60s, for instance. There’s a feeling of it being part of a political re-enactment society, where everyone likes all the ritual and rigmarole of poster launches even though they know they don’t mean anything anymore, but who wants to go to report on the start of a new social media targeting strategy?

And while we’re talking of obscure and possibly outdated methods of election campaigning, let’s turn to Election Leaflet Of The Day, where my absence has finally opened the trickle gates and allowed a decent number of new leaflets to appear on the site. So, let’s turn our attention to Boston and Skegness, where as well as the usual array of candidates, there’ll be a small party with no MPs and little support standing. However, we don’t have any leaflets from Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips on the site yet, so we’ll have to look at another small party, calling itself ‘A Blue Revolution’, with the subheading of being ‘The Worker’s Party’. (I suspect the latter is what they really wanted to call themselves but were thwarted by there already being a well-established Irish party with the same name) Their manifesto appears to be a mix of populism and some form of socialism (cut bureaucracy and more workplace democracy, but only in the public sector) and they call for Britain to maintain strong links with ‘the real countries of Europe’ which appears to be an odd bit of rhetoric, rather than an assertion of there being some fake countries in Europe. Or perhaps they think all the bureaucracy is being used to maintain Ruritania’s EU membership? We shall have to await their appearance in Parliament to find out.

Twenty days to go, and the finish line is creeping ever closer…

UPDATE: Being an idiot, I forgot to put in a link to today’s leaflet of the day. It now has one.