April 2009 | The Septic's Companion

Right: Not too many people

One pet peeve I have concerns the fact that most governments insist upon paying people to reproduce. When I am president of a country, the first law I enact will be to remove child benefits. I may even imitate my favourite government, that of the People’s Republic of China, and instate some sort of penalty for having children. Life will be great. House prices will go through the floor. There’ll never be any traffic. You’ll never be put on hold when you call tech support. Hmm, wait, maybe they’ll reduce the number of support staff. Scratch that last one. Anyway, the world will be a way better place, and all the people who decide to have children will pay appropriately for the privilege. Don’t get me wrong – I like children. In fact, I’ve been trying to persuade the wife to help me produce some. They’re just the least environmentally friendly thing we could be doing right now, and for some reason they attract government grants. It’s like subsidising Buicks.

This rant was intended to lead into an almost wholly unrelated topic. That unrelated topic was the fact that America is quite sparsely populated, although the rest of the world doesn’t really know it. Take a look at Wikipedia’s list of countries by population density. America is number 177 of the 238 countries in there. It’s less densely populated than Zimbabwe and Bhutan. There are ten times as many people in a square kilometre of Israel as there are in a square kilometre of America. There’s nobody here. For its size, it’s a ghost country.

This is good because I like hiking, and I like hiking without bumping into other people all the time. I used to go hiking a lot when I lived in London – you could get to the Peak District in four hours, but to get to any mountains higher than Trump Tower you’d be looking at the Lake District, which meant six or seven hours in the car. And even once you’re in the Lake District, it still has the trappings of a fairly densely populated place. You’re never too far from an Olde Worlde Tea Shoppe, or a McDonalds, or some roadworks. This, of course, is mostly due to the very high population density in the UK. As far as rating London against other cities goes, I don’t think population density captures quite what I’m talking about. I’ve developed a new unit of measure to quantify this. Which I will now explain. In the next paragraph.

Were I to start the car in downtown Seattle on a Saturday afternoon and drive purposefully out of town, I’d be in the countryside reasonably quickly. Of course, my idea of the countryside might not match yours, so in order to reliably measure this we need to agree on some sort of standard fixture that is present in the countryside but not in town. This is the cow. Seattle, therefore, has a rating of somewhere around thirty minutes to cow. In London I think I’d be looking at well over 90MTC. Edinburgh, where my family lives, is about 25-30MTC. Manhattan is probably 120MTC. Of course, Bumfluff Arizona is probably a mere 1MTC, but you wouldn’t want to live there. This is why you should be careful to bear in mind population size when considering MTC ratings. I tried to come up with a simple way to work it in, but I couldn’t come up with any measure that didn’t make Los Angeles seem like a dairy farm. Suggestions appreciated.

Wrong: Antisocial networking

Okay, I admit it. This is almost definitely not an American phenomenon. I suspect it’s a worldwide thing that happened since I got to America. However, my friend Ryan tells me that blogs are supposed to have themes and stick to them, and America is my theme, ergo this is a problem with America. Nobody said this was going to be fair.

Something new is happening in the world. Nobody had heard of it ten years ago, but now you’re doing it with almost everyone you know. That new thing is social networking. Social networking is the great electronic bringing-together of people. Social networking allows people to interact online with their friends, their family and their colleagues more easily than ever before. With a couple of clicks of a mouse, it’s now possible to learn that your ex-girlfriend became a lesbian, discover that your boss spends his weekends performing live-action roleplay and find pictures of your uncle Bill vomiting in a pint glass in a strip bar. How did we live without this?

A fascinating part of social networking is a feature called the “status update”. You can now inform your friends, family and colleagues what you’re up to at any given second. I am going to take the dog for a walk. I am going to work. I am at work. I am still at work. I am probably working late. I am working late. You can even do this using your mobile phone. I’m standing at the bus stop. I’m thinking about buying some chairs. I’m taking a dump.

This is great. We’re all in touch with everyone we know, all the time. Unfortunately, it is also the root cause of man’s very newest newest personality disorder. Let me introduce antisocial networking: the state of being more involved in updating your status message than in actually doing whatever it is you’re claiming to be doing.

Let me illustrate this principle by showing you a selection of Twitter posts.

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Wow, that must be some great brunch they’re all having. I missed one hell of a time there. Why did I end up staying home? Well, wait. Let me show you a photograph of that brunch.

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These people are not having a great time. They’re so interested in talking about having a good time that they have forgotten to have a good time. There are antisocial networkers reading this now. I know there are, because I mentioned this post on Twitter. Come on, guys. Come on, you antisocial networkers. The last time you actually had a good time, did you Tweet about it whilst it was happening? As you slipped between the sheets with Miss South America, did you lean over to rummage for your phone in your crumpled jeans on the floor? As you pointed the nose of the powerboat you’d unexpectedly been lent towards the setting Pacific sun and slid the throttle towards the bow, did you ponder which pocket your iPhone was in? As you opened the door to discover that your boyfriend had covered the entire house in rose petals, put up the sets of shelving that had been in the garage since 2001, smeared himself in honey and prostrated himself on the couch, did you look at the kitchen table to check whether you hibernated your laptop? No. You did not. This is because actual interesting stuff was really happening to you. Perhaps a good Twitter feature would be to add “and bored” to the end of every post.

Wrong: Hogs

So I’m something of a Car Guy, but let it be said that I like motorcycles as much as the next man. They look nice, they’re fun and they’re fast. My, they’re fast. Driving a car quickly is a fairly cerebral experience, whereas riding a motorcycle at pace is more like a test of virility.

There are fast bikes made all over the place. The best ones mostly come from Japan, but some of the greats come from Italy, Germany – even the United Kingdom, who appear to be less shit at making bikes than they were at making cars. The best way to see a bunch of fast bikes is to turn up at the Nürburgring on a Saturday afternoon and hunt around the car park. Ah, the smell of mineral oil and the rattle of those Ducati dry clutches. This is the life.

There is, however, one motorbike that you’re not going to see at the Nürburgring on a Saturday afternoon. That motorbike is the two-wheeled abortion known as the Harley Davidson.

There are two things wrong with Harley Davidsons. The first thing is technical. I’ve not ridden one, so I don’t know how they drive. Instead, I’m going to guess how they drive by comparing some vital statistics of the 2009 Harley Davidson Sportster 1200 Low (which appears to be one of their sportier models) with the 2009 Yamaha YZF-R6, one of the Japanese efforts. Perhaps the best way to represent this is in a table. Please excuse the American units of measure – it was all Harley had and I couldn’t be bothered converting them.

	Yamaya YRF-R6	Harley Davidson Sportster
Engine size	599 cc	1200 cc
Power	126 bhp	80 bhp
Weight	414 lbs	581 lbs
0-60mph	3.6 secs	5 secs
Top speed	165 mph	110 mph
Price	$9,990	$9,799

Based unfairly on these numbers and my own preconceptions, I’m going to guess that a Harley Davidson drives like a Dodge Durango. I bet I’m right. Anyway, either way it’s clear from this that the Harley Davidson Sportster wasn’t designed with sport in mind. But cars are more comfortable, drier, more practical overall – what was it designed for? Which brings me nicely to the second thing that is wrong with Harley Davidsons.

The second thing that is wrong with Harley Davidsons is that they are one of the greatest triumphs of marketing ever to exist. This is done in part by the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club. The Hell’s Angels is a group of unemployed misfits and small-time cat burgulars who are scattered around the world. Every so often they hit the headlines when one of them punches a woman outside a nightclub, or strangles his dog, or chokes to death on his own vomit. One thing they have in common is that that all happen to own Harley Davidson motorcycles. You have to have a Harley to get into the club.

Harley Davidson, of course, don’t officially have any relationship with the Hell’s Angels. Officially, they’re pretty angry with them. That’s the way it has to work. Harley Davidson knows that scattered all over America are bored dentists, middle-aged stockbrokers and lonely realtors who are sitting in front of the television watching their lives ebbing away. They have money in the bank, but they’ve already bought a house in the suburbs, a brown dog and a silver BMW 525. They can’t think of anything else to spend it on. More importantly, their wives are complaining about their rapidly receding hairlines and increasing levels of impotency. But wait! Breaking news on the television! Some Hell’s Angels have broken a window in a bar downtown! There they are on television, with their tatoos, and all that leather gear and their Harleys. I bet they’re not impotent! I bet their wives don’t talk back to them! And all I need to do to join that club is ten grand!

So the morticians and the lawyers run out and buy Harleys. They don’t join the Hell’s Angels. It would be too difficult to explain in church. They do buy leather jackets, and patches with skulls and crossbones on them. They do buy helmets with “ride or die” and such on them. They do meet up with other similarly-minded individuals, where they stand on street corners in their leathers and talk about the Dow Jones, or about interest rates, or about how difficult Thomas is finding it settling in at Yale. One or two of them will sometimes smoke, and now and again someone will turn up with a beer. Passers-by cross the street to avoid these meetings, which gives the dentists a strange, inexplicably heart-warming sensation. They’re radicals. They’re on the fringes of society. They’re alive. Before they go home, they collect their litter.