Updated on March 14. Pity nobody took me up on a rhetorical bet...
Heightened attention to the voices of women and a moratorium on madness: these were my plans until it swiftly became apparent the most modest of goals can be mutually exclusive.
 The week had barely begun when one woman friend said she thought we should never speak to each other again, for reasons I'd be unlikely to give you even if I knew what they were.
She uses the word "complicated" far too frequently and previously expressed both admiration and irritation at my conclusion, from a still recent survey of the state of the world, that nobody's ever likely to get into a mess of a kind new to human experience and thus one "you simply can't understand".
Were I allowed to tell you more, there's probably a tidy fortune to be made from anybody willing to risk betting the woman still won't be trading words with me by the end of the month, but it's simpler to say "Stina Nordenstam".
Never mind that I'm around seven years late in writing a plug for 'People are Strange', a title which once suited my mood of a moment well enough to grab it and seek out more of her later.
"Like flawed glass, there is a terrible and forboding quality that surrounds this album. (...) You cannot compare Stina Nordenstam [pinched pic by Matthias Elgemark] to any other artist when she sings her own material, and so you resist the temptation when she perfoms songs by Leonard Cohen, Rod Stewart, Prince.
"This album is winningly and consistently original. It prickles like raw glass fibre. And, as you listen, the sounds swaddle you in the discomforting warmth of a favourite rash."
A little precious perhaps, but 'merve.funboy' at the Amazon link gets the girl about right. [March 14: as, it seems, did I. That bet nobody took me up on? She held out for all of three days before a touch of the sun made her right as rain again.]
I got a less pleasant dose of "discomforting warmth" when somebody who has only to open their mouth sometimes to slide a notion like Blog Bitch of the Month Award -- irrespective of gender -- into my head decided almost to rub shoulders with me and asked moments later: "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?"
The straight answer? "Yes. If you don't like my vocabulary, I'll lend you my spare earplugs." I've given up many habits some people don't like. The liberal application of obscenities to shoddy work on my editor's screen at the Factory from journalists who should know better isn't one of them, especially now I know we do well to say what we're thinking (and so will you, in due course, if your attention hasn't yet wandered elsewhere).
 I'm slightly ashamed to admit my mouth has been nowhere near my mum for around four years by her count, except during our phone conversations. That's how long she thinks it is since any desire to cross the Channel has taken hold of me.
But Tuesday was International Women's Day so I decided to leave out the suggestion that the woman who had plunked her butt in the seat next to mine choose one of the several empty ones out of hearing range until her mood had improved.
Anyway, a few moments later I was jammed up against other bodies underground and plugged into PJ Harvey's timely account of "The Life And Death Of Mr. Badmouth", the first track on 'Uh Huh Her', after ignoring a kindly warning from the iTMS (need I still spell out iTunes Music Store) that the woman was "explicit" -- just how I like 'em.
I don't know quite what it is about PJ, but she and her moods have become an indispensable part of a library of voices of women so varied the chances of further musical synchronicity with BJ were next to nil and I didn't bother to ask what he'd been listening to on Tuesday night.
Barry's just joined the cavalry. After a couple of weeks when the relentless tide of news refused to ebb for an understaffed English desk at the Factory simply because the school holidays were upon us, David -- whose name I'll give you now he's had his honeymoon and is no longer the "new desk chief" -- decided to let me keep a second "Africa person" rather than stealing the ones whose initials were down for it, on a ever-changing, rota for other duties including taking turns to go to Rome. Thus it was that BJ spent his first day in Africa with me (promptly to be addressed as "Baz" by Lauren in Dakar). I can only regret that the repeat duet due on Friday has been called off, again for reasons beyond our control.
One of the few things Barry "B-Flat Liquorice-Stick Bluenote" James (as we thought Lauren ought to call him instead) and me don't get to chat about is non-classical music recorded after the man's cut-off date, since he's got one but I lost mine on account of the Kid and a bottomless pit some tedious people at the bank prefer to call "your troubled account". If he objected to my small tales, even the ones where I'm the object of constant sexual harassment, he was kind enough not to say so.
Remember my now infamous but widely read "Diktats" of New Year's Day?
These were nothing to BJ's helpful hints when he was a big chief at UPI back in the days before news agencies had to start sending journalists to waste their time in hotel rooms waiting for a pontiff to pop his clogs, partly because that particular outfit apparently bribed the Vatican doctor to give them a wink when he snuffed it. The physician, it seems, saw fit to prove his word with a few snapshots of dead pope, whereupon UPI published them.
The upshot is that if a pope decides to hang around Urbi et Orbi during vacation time in newsrooms nowadays, they get even emptier. I end up temporarily turning Factories into Madhouses in this log. I just about manage to keep my head and sometimes my temper while I'm inside them. You the Faithful Five and ¾ suffer the consequences of such restraint if you can be bothered to take a sauna in the steam vented about why I include myself among the "old timers" who know the difference between a news story and the "modern" way of bombarding clients with whistles and bells about nonsense of no interest to anyone but other journalists doing exactly the same.
Last week, life took an upturn when those who had temporarily deemed it safer -- after protests from people who told us our chit-chat and jokes were bad for their concentration -- to pass each other notes reading "Shouldn't gossip, but [wild fancies or cunning thoughts fill this space]" timidly ventured to resume our banter.
 Things got even better when I walked into work on Monday to find the place had switched from red-alert Madhouse status to the usual neon-lit Factory and even that Martin was so oblivious to all those rota changes he'd decided to come in and do Africa with me, after an enjoyable trip to the southern end of the continent, when I expected to be on my own again.
Jokes were clearly once again allowed on deck.
BJ, who'd survived hell, was dispensing diktats -- the illustration here is a historical document -- when the news was in capitals and the word "wire" meant what it says instead of a satellite link. I don't recall whether soft patterned toilet tissue had then been invented, but in those days the Factory was a place I occasionally visited on trade union business. Its own stories circulated on extra-large bogrolls of a hue which hasn't improved in my archives with age, unless vomit green is back in style, and AFP computer screens were the green on black colours idiot "experts" then thought good for the eyes, which France subsequently adopted for the Minitel before everybody discovered the Internet.
Like television, the Net is both a boon and bane of the profession in ways interestingly written about in one of the books on the updated list on the left, Dan Gillmor's 'We The Media'.
In that list, you'll also find the reason I was able to tell Harmonie -- a woman apparently so incapable of keeping quiet I suggested she might want to put up a flag if bits of her vocalised stream of consciousness are for anybody's benefit but for her own -- about:
"Hack 61. Talk to Yourself
"Language isn't just for talking to other people; it may play a vital role in helping your brain combine information from different modules.
Language might be an astoundingly efficient way of getting information into your head from the outside [Hack #49], but that's not its only job. It also helps you think. Far from being a sign of madness, talking to yourself is something at the essence of being human. (...)
"Peter Carruthers [warning: MGs* required] thinks that you get this effect because language is essential for conjoining information from different modules. Specifically he thinks that it is needed at the interface between beliefs, desires, and planning. Combining across modalities is possible without language for simple actions (see the other crossmodal hacks [Hack #57] through [Hack #59] in this book for examples), but there's something about planning, and that includes reorientation, that requires language.
"This would explain why people sometimes begin to talk to themselves—to instruct themselves out loud—during especially difficult tasks. Children use self-instruction as a normal part of their development to help them carry out things they find difficult. Telling them to keep quiet is unfair and probably makes it harder for them to finish what they are doing."
There's some great stuff in 'Mind Hacks'.
Stephen Hampshire remarks in a review at Amazon UK:
"The authors have an infectious enthusiasm for the subject which is manifest in a lot of links and supplementary reading (as well as a blog). It's certainly a good idea to have the internet accessible to you while you read so you can look up the demos they link to, or you'll find your copy overflowing with bookmarks like I did."
These often clever ideas from Matt Webb and Tom Stafford (O'Reilly UK, December 2004), are ideal Safari Bookshelf material, since reading them the way that superb site presents them on line means you can dispense with paper bookmarks altogether.
The book is full of tips for anybody with as subversive an outlook on life and what my parents called "the System", meaning generally established ways of behaving, as my own. I'll probably use a lot of my stored-up Safari points to download the whole thing in .pdf format at this rate, but have to confess that one section has taught me precisely why some people are better than others at working and messing around at the same time. I suppose that means I'll have to take it more graciously than ever when told to "Just shut up!"
Who among us can resist hacks like "Explore Your Defence Hardware" (no 32 of 100) or "Keep Your Sources Straight (If you Can)" (no 84), plus a bit of help to "Spread a Bad Mood Around" (no 99)?
Since I value my job marginally more than my reputation I'll spare everybody the names of those who have no need of that last little number. Also, I have yet to find the appropriate hack for people like Ellie who hum to themselves while they work, but I bet there is one.
All the same, the psychology stored in my neurons is that people have so many different sorts of intelligence any attempt to qualify one of them as better than another is almost invariably absurd. We all pick and choose from a range of "multi-tasking" abilities in our own ways. Unlike the Kid and her kind, I find it almost impossible to write while listening to music.
I'm disappointed women's place in music and the other arts have yet to be given the space they deserve in a Wikipedia article on the event ... or in most of this year's reports on it at the Factory, where all anybody seemed to care about was the politics and economics of the occasion.
 The voices of women have shot back up to the top of my list of favourite sounds so fast of late that the whole idea of a special day for them now has a very absurd side, unless I could issue a diktat suggesting that just once a year maybe they could all stop protesting about my bad habits.
On Sunday the Kid said: "Dad, you're crazy. That's your fourth iPod. What are you going to do for holiday money?"
"Sell at least one of the others as soon as I've had a chance to get them fixed," I replied. I might, but the truth is I'd rather keep my head as full of music as working days will allow than worry about vacations, especially when the times many people clear out of Paris are my favourite ones to be here.
With the latest iPod on my belt and more storage space than ever, my next stop was my CD library for the 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes?' box set of 41 songs by the late, very special Sandy Denny -- Reinhard Zierke's site is one of the Net's best tributes to a woman I'd once travel a long way to hear -- along with a few more women now part of a portable feast.
 Then I went mad at the iTunes music store, both for myself and the Kid, who really deserves a present or two simply for being one of the sanest people around me.
My last woman pictured here is Aimee Mann, since I enjoyed 'Bachelor No. 2' so much that I listened to the whole album twice on Monday to take in some really good lyrics.
Recently enough for it to be mildly embarrassing, I noted what a pity it was few women songwriters seemed to have touched on the darker sides of the Big L and tell it like it is when things fall apart.
I happily withdraw that remark for the stupidity it was now I know better. There are places in the ever expanding domain of sexual politics I'd prefer never to revisit, but should you be in the kind of mood where you think nobody can ever understand how you feel, let alone written a decent song about it, I'd also take a substantial bet you're wrong.
Just think. If I win one of the bets in this entry, perhaps I could go part-time at the Factory and turn the celebration of women into an almost full-time occupation! For now, however, that's like trying to keep music a profit machine for fat cats, mostly male: a 'Downhill Battle'.
____
*Do I still need to spell out "mental gymnastics"?
12:27:57 AM link 
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