Trigger Happy Nation

As much as I can I try to keep an open mind in this crazy country. I can handle being mistaken for an Australian, the cab drivers who neither speak English nor know where they're going, even dogs dressed as humans, all these I can accept; but some things I can't ever get my head around and don't think I ever will. It's exactly a week ago since the shootings at Virginia Tech, 32 people killed by a student, and in the inevitable fallout of this incident the hot topic of gun control has once more been debated across the airwaves. It's an argument I have little comprehension of beyond the premise that guns kill, we have no need for them in our day to day lives, therefore people shouldn't have them. Quote that one line here though and a large group of Americans will come back with the words, "Ah, but the Second Amendment states that we have the right to bear arms."
And it's at this point that the great debate begins.

There are plenty of places you can follow that discussion, where people today try to defend a right that was decreed in 1791 in a country operating under totally different conditions. I'm not going to get into that can of worms here. This space is generally kept blog-lite. The only reason that I've touched on the subject at all is that I witnessed a piece of madness in the whole gun ownership argument this week. A friend watching CNN in London couldn't believe his ears when a guest on the station actually suggested that the incident at Virginia Tech would never have happened if the teachers were armed. So shocked was my friend that he chose to text me at 6am to tell me. I put it down to a kook on the airwaves until I turned on the news a little later to hear exactly the same theory being put forward. Hopping around the channels only unearthed more such supporters of this idea and apparently it's not a new argument either, it's been raging for years! (As has bad broadcast news evidently...)


Arm the teachers? ARM THE TEACHERS?? GUNS IN SCHOOL? The little statement at the top of this page reads, "Two countries divided by a common language", I'm thinking of revising that to "Two countries divided by common sense." When DEA agents can't handle their weapons properly what hope is there for teachers?


If ever there was a case for not seeing the wood for the trees this is it. Don't solve the problem by removing the root cause, no, let's throw more guns at it instead!

Anyway, if a guy in heels, make-up and a dress can see where the problem lies then maybe it's about time that the serious people did too.

Paraskavedekatriaphobia?

It appears it's a universal truth that we have to deal with whichever country we live in. When you need someone to come home to install something there's only one time that they can come - when you're at work. You're totally at the mercy of someone's twisted scheduling. "Yes sir, we can install your cable on Thursday between 9am and 2pm." And then you're at the mercy of the contractor's twisted time-keeping. He doesn't come on Thursday between 9am and 2pm he comes on Friday at 7pm... after you've waited at home all day. Would anyone care to explain this to me? A friend came up with a pretty good explanation last Friday, "It's the 13th, and you're the one who got hit by it this time." Yes I did.

I sat down to breakfast, spilling cereal over my lap, hoping to fire off a few work emails. I only got as far as booting up the computer before the all dreaded 'hang'. This is probably another universal truth: your computer will die at the most inconvenient time. The reaction is pretty universal too.
"Hello?" Tap tap tap at the keys. "Oh, come on. Open! Close! Anything, I'll take anything from you, just do SOMETHING!"
Like speaking louder to people who don’t understand what you’re saying, at this point you feel it necessary to start hitting the keyboard.
"No, no, no, no, nooooo! Where did all the icons go?"

It's now that the first signs of panic set in. The cursor judders across the desktop, applications stop loading, the screen takes on the appearance of a frozen jigsaw puzzle phasing in and out of this dimension. I imagine there was a mirror of me somewhere else in the universe having the same experience, but probably eating Apple Jacks and not Cornflakes.

They say that in times of emergency skills you never knew you had suddenly come to the fore. I once did a first aid course with the St John's Ambulance but thought that I had forgotten most of it; my instincts didn't let me down though. My fingers spidered across the keyboard, "Ctrl-Alt-Delete, two three, four. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, two three four. Reboot damnit! Reboot!" It didn't look good. Computer Program Resuscitation wasn’t working, the screen was going a sickly grey colour, and I was facing the prospect of not seeing my hard drive again. It was about this time that the remainder of my cereal spilled down my shirt.

I’m usually a big fan of Fridays but there are some days when it’s probably best not to get out of bed at all - I stubbed my toe getting out of bed that morning. When I rushed my laptop to ‘PC hospital’ and the Best Buy Geek Squad guy (yes, he exists) heard that I had to hurry back because the cable man was coming, he just chuckled knowingly.
“Don’t hold your breath, pal.”


I didn’t, but hurried back anyway. Four riveting hours later he turned up... with the wrong cable box. It appears that some things are the same the world over, but call me superstitious I think the date probably had a little to do with it too. Come July 13th I'll be spending the day in bed.

On the move

If you were watching this city on TV I think "FFwd>>x8" would be an appropriate little annotation in the corner of the screen. It's nuts out there - high-speed nuts, and probably not a place for a Japanese tourist to be stood curiously filming the world go by at 5pm in Grand Central Station. Camcorder in hand the bemused little man was pinged this way and that by a criss-crossing hoard of New Yorkers all late for something or the other. Slumped back here on my sofa - sorry, couch - this evening all I can see out of the window are bodies being whisked from N to Y and back to C and the picture hasn't changed much over the past 24 hours. A continual stream of cars pouring across the bridges, a water taxi zipping up and down the river, the worming army of silver subway trains slipping by every 3-5 min. The airspace isn't any less dynamic. Where one or two airports are usually more than enough to service a large city, here that wouldn't be heard of. Newark, Laguardia, Teterboro and JFK - four airports crammed within a 15 mile radius of New York City handling over 100 million passengers per year and making the airspace above my head the busiest in the world.

Awake or asleep, on the move or in your living room, you are literally surrounded by people - above, below and next door - it really is three-dimensional chaos. Of course, about 150 years ago, it was only two-dimensional chaos. There was a time, as Manhattan expanded, when it was projected that the island would soon reach its capacity for growth. In the 1880s The Brooklyn Bridge was built not to join Brooklyn to Manhattan but to join Manhattan to Brooklyn and the open, expansive farmland of Long Island beyond. Growth, it was thought, would continue in that direction once the small island of Manhattan had outgrown itself. However it was around that time that refinements in the mass production of steel came about - ironically heavily used in constructing the Brooklyn Bridge - and the vertical limitations surrounding building construction were overcome with steel frameworks and the steel-cabled elevators needed to service them. Manhattan began a new growth phase - upwards - and it hasn't looked down since.

I never really enjoyed history at school. It was all names and dates - the last thing you want to be learning. I think it's a whole different story the moment you realise you're surrounded by it though; when you can walk across a piece of history, or when you realise that your commute is taking you through the world's largest train station and that the Japanese tourist standing in your way is actually transfixed by its vast astronomical ceiling of stars overhead. Looking up you realise you're seeing a reversed view of the constellations - reversed as if seeing them from "God's perspective" - a result of the design being based on an outdated manuscript from the Middle Ages.

.

I'm beginning to see that by taking a step back from the chaos there are stories to be found everywhere.