While Bird

Do people with ‘asbestos hands’ tend to live longer?

Are there certain lifestyle diseases they face an increased risk of developing?

Generally speaking, are they contented, more productive people? Or are they prone to frustration and nervousness?

I am fidgeting as I type, tapping and wriggling, and touching and picking at different parts of my body. It is very unbecoming.

If I stop fidgeting what happens is I immediately look up and out of the window onto the garden, and then I also stop typing.  

It is like an equation:

• I fidget as I type
• I can stop fidgeting if I look out the window / If I stop fidgeting I will immediately look up and out the window
• I cannot both look out the window and type  

It is almost like the game paper, scissors, rock, where the window defeats the fidgeting and the fidgeting defeats the typing, except the window also defeats the typing. And the fidgeting does not really defeat so much as compromise the typing, (and really the fidgeting induces the look out of the window onto the garden).

At the moment the typing cannot defeat either the fidgeting, which seems to be a bit cunning, but skittish and unfocused, or the window, which seems impartial and is probably indifferent. The only hope is that the typing might outlast both the fidgeting and the window, waiting until they eventually get bored with the game and give up, or simply forget about the typing and leave me free to start getting on with things.

A is for Amazon.com

B is for Best Buy

C is for craigslist

D is for Dictionary.com

E is for eBay

F is for Facebook

G is for Google

H is for Hotmail

I is for Internal Revenue Service

J is for JetBlue

K is for Kohl’s Department Stores

L is for Lowe’s Home Improvement

M is for MapQuest

N is for Netflix

O is for Orbitz Travel

P is for Pandora Radio

Q is for Famous Quotes at BrainyQuote

R is for Redbox

S is for Southwest Airlines

T is for Target.com

U is for USPS - The United States Postal Service (U.S. Postal Service)

V is for Verizon Wireless

W is for Will Smith

X is for Xbox 360

Y is for YouTube

Z is for Zillow

…

Instant

At my work in a fairly large private media business all of the people who work in the same position as I do use Google.com at an extremely high frequency. We use the website to check the spelling of proper nouns, usually places, companies or people’s names (politicians, business spokespeople, police officers, criminals, victims of crime and their family members and legal representatives, experts, social researchers or celebrities). Due to the expectation we complete our tasks in a very short and prescribed time frame we are each of us constantly clattering away at Google.com, making literally many hundreds of searches in a working day.

Some months ago, I noticed a discreet link to Google Instant had appeared just below the Google search box, inviting me to a slightly different version of the search engine. Some time after that, I noticed that on the browser on my work computer Google.com would now automatically load Google Instant, but offer, by way of a discreet link just below the search box, the opportunity to “Turn off Google Instant.” Now, when I load Google.com it is also Google Instant—they are now one and the same—and there is no longer any link to turn off the ‘instant’ aspect.

Insistent

Meanwhile, the computers at my work are all relatively quite old and slow, and the technological requirements of the Google Chrome browser means it often wildly outpaces the computers’ capabilities. The frenetic zeal of Google Instant, sweeping the entire Internet in an instant, will frequently leave my computer, which has dust and old crumbs caked in the crevices of its keyboard, wheezing and exhausted. On these occasions I may be typing out my proper noun, but only two or three letters will make it through to Google’s search box before the computer freezes, and yet Google Instant will industriously return a result anyway: Werribee’s ‘Wer’ becomes ‘Werner Herzog’; Deputy Police Commissioner Ken Lay’s ‘Dep’ becomes ‘Major depression’; Victoria Police’s ‘Vic’ becomes ‘Victoria’s Secret’; etc.

Name book

On Google, I’ve seen there have emerged very clear celebrity monopolies on given names. Type in any given name into Google Instant, and pages and pages of results will be returned for just one celebrity: after an instant, ‘kylie’ returns pop singer Kylie Minogue, ‘rebecca’ returns pop singer Rebecca Black, ‘chris’ returns pop singer Chris Brown, my own name, ‘will,’ returns movie star Will Smith. 

gay

Lastly, when searching Google for the names of certain male public figures, like some lower-profile sports stars, news readers, and both lesser- and well-known entertainers, the second or third search suggestion alongside their full name is very, very often ‘gay’: ‘sam gilbert gay’; ‘joe o’brien abc gay’; ‘george clooney gay’; ‘vin diesel is he gay’; etc, indicating speculation about the possible homosexuality of male public figures is a significant preoccupation of people using Google.com.

…

Methodology

The above list was composed by typing just the single letter into the Google Instant search engine, and then waiting an instant for the top result. To conduct the search, I signed out of my Gmail account (I use Gmail), cleared my browser of all that I could see could be cleared (‘history,’ ‘cache’), and went to Google.com, instead of Google.com.au (reasoning universality, though finding America). I believe Google’s results reflect the popularity of searches made, and so these results reflect the popular enquiries of the world (America), but of course they also shape them.

Data

Of the 26 listings above, 15 (ABEJKLMNOPRSTVX) are all explicitly commercial enterprises, selling goods or services as their primary focus. Of these, six (ABEKLT) offer what I’ll call ‘conventional retail,’ selling a broad range of general household goods, like clothes and electrical appliances. While the remaining nine offer more specialised services, including four entertainment companies (NPRX), three travel companies (JOS), one maps company (M) and one Internet and telecommunications company (V).

Eight of the remaining 11 (CDFGHQYZ) are also profitable commercial enterprises, largely making their money, I think, through advertising revenue. Of the remaining three, two are government services (IU), and and there is only one individual out of the 26 (W), though it could be argued Will Smith is also a profitable commercial enterprise.

Of the 26, I’d put 11 in a category of ‘Internet-specific,’ i.e. organisations that did not pre-date, and came about in response to the Internet, and which depend on the Internet for their existence: ACEFGHNOPYZ. Of these, I believe seven could be considered Internet ‘pioneers’ (ACEFGHY), of which four (CFGH) could be considered administrative services, two (AE) facilitators of commerce and one (Y) an entertainment medium (though F, and to a lesser extent G and H, could certainly also make the claim to entertainment, or at least pass-time). Two of the four non-pioneer Internet-specific services (NP) would also be classed as entertainment, and the other two (OZ) as industry-specific administrative services.

Eleven (BIJKLRSTUV) either clearly pre-date the Internet, or theoretically do not depend intrinsically upon/are not based exclusively on the Internet for their existence (JR), or profit very particularly from the Internet, and use its technologies, but pre-date it in earlier forms (VM). A category for these could be called IRL (In Real Life).

The remaining four are a little less certain. One is a computer game medium (X) which can be seen to exist separate from the Internet as experienced in a web browser, but is obviously a heavily digitally-grounded pursuit. One is a movie star (W). And two (DQ) are the only two generic terms, describing language-based reference tools, which have, nonetheless, under Google Instant, also become commercialised, presumably trade-marked, presumably highly profitable businesses.

In a name

Of the websites’s names, 13 are neologisms: CEFHJMNORVXYZ, of which eight (CEFHJMRY) are basic portmanteau or compound words whose implied meanings are immediately apprehensible, and the remaining five (NOVXZ) consist of made-up or intentionally misspelt words, which are usually nonetheless reasonably transparent portmanteau words, for example: ‘Zillow,’ the real estate data company’s own website explains, is a portmanteau of “zillions of data points for homes accessible to everyone,” and ‘pillow’ since a home “is where you lay your head to rest at night.”

Of those names that are not neologisms, three (KLW) are family names, either the surnames of company founders (KL), or the full name of the only individual on the list, Will Smith. The two US Government services are bureaucratic titles more commonly known by their acronyms (IU). Five (BDQST) are simple, non-proper nouns, used to short, sharp effect as brand names (BT), or adhering to the prior, literal meaning (DQ, and there is something literal about S). The remaining three (AGP) are re- or misappropriated terms, from the world of science (G), the natural world (A), or mythology (P, and possibly A).

Google/googol

The brand name of Google is actually an alteration of the word googol, which describes the very large number of a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name googol was apparently coined in 1938 by a 9-year-old named Milton Sirotta who was the nephew of an American mathematician named Edward Kasner.

On Wikipedia (which it seems is less popular as a stand alone search term on Google than Will Smith), a googol is described as having “no particular significance in mathematics, but is useful when comparing with other very large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of hypothetically possible chess moves.” Kasner, Wikipedia says, used googol “to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity….”

A googolplex is an even more preposterously large number, and on its Wikipedia page there is a number of amusing demonstrations of just how large it is. Apparently the same 9-year-old nephew came up with the term googolplex to describe a number that was a “one followed by writing zeroes until you get tired.” Popular astronomer Carl Sagan is said to have estimated that writing a googolplex (which is formally 10 to the power of googol) in numerals would be physically impossible, “since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides.” Another example explains that the time it would take a human to write out a googolplex by hand would be many, many times the age of universe.

Google, Inc. have named their corporate headquarters Googleplex. (It is located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, United States, near San Jose.) 

The difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity

Though Google will never know me completely, it does know an awful lot about my search habits, which would indicate to some extent my interests, the nature of my day job, the gaps and uncertainties in my knowledge, my passing health concerns, and also some of my insecurities, fixations, longings and desires. Like a ‘pinpression’ board, or a well-worn pair of shoes, or my bedroom when I am not in it, somewhere within the immensity of Google is a very detailed outline of me, but I realise the same also has to be true for millions and possibly billions of other people.

Standing for a stout man to reclaim a window seat, far below he sees: withered clouds and brownish peaks.

‘I had forgotten you, ground.’ He picks up his book to read. The stout man is shifting in his seat.

‘The weekend is retreating, and the plane is flying south, but I am still here.

‘Now is this plane and that man, but it is always these hands (one is holding the other), tonight: still these feet, and then always this nose, this breath, always that voice when I speak.’

Where we disembark, the train station’s walls have been cut away at eye-level, revealing a composition of world-renown. A clutch of cumulus clouds riveted, top-left, complements a dazzling blue sky.

Sydney’s glare has contracted my pupils to reptilian dots, but I move closer, stopping to tip my hat to the view. It returns my gaze and coos across the bay, insouciant: “Here I am.”

Blooming with the untainted white of chemical reactions, the clouds do not move until you’ve looked away. In submission to a peevish crowd who’ve seen it all before, I make my way down the escalators and onto the promenade.

At ground level the train arrivals merge with the thousands of boat people, docked from distant lands, and we all dissolve into the denizen-cocktail of Sydney Cove.

I should have worn a hat.

Lost in the crowds are indefatigable street-performer entrepreneurs. An Aboriginal didgeridoo-trance act thumps its constant beat: CDs for sale, or just a photograph taken with the real thing. A metallic man doesn’t quite gleam. The human statue’s arms beckon wildly at shy children, compelling their parents into pics first, coins later. A grown man who dances with a life-sized doll has branded his own name on his act, offering a clue that the absurdity he peddles has been long-since trodden into dust. As they tango on and on and on and on, a hefty elderly lady, staggering by in a forward stoop, bellows to her old-ish daughter: “I thought it was a REAL GIRL!!”

Tacking forward, past seafood restaurants and upmarket Australiana shops, the Guylian Café bobs into view. With its polished granite décor, unchanged since a mid-90s heyday, Guylian’s HQ feels either fixed in time, or out of it: perpetually-melting chocolate shells.

Pooped grey nomads line the final approach, decked out in determinedly practical attire of comfort, light shades and ventilation; sentries on individuated seats that splay out like flower petals, they must twist stiff spines in order to maintain eye contact during the debrief. “Did that man just take our photograph?”

As with all icons, seen mediated—on post cards, TV tourism packages, or corporate logos—or from afar, the Opera House looks a little exposed this close up. Grandeur desires its correct measure of scale and distance. As a child I believed its texture to be the bendy grey-white of glossy cardboard, or like the snipped wooden Paddle Pop sticks a Grade 6 classmate used to make her prize-winning Opera House miniature. Up close, cordially introduced, I pause, teetering, before the stairs whose expanse can lend the impression of isolation in a space that replenishes its pilgrim legions every waking hour.

Crawling in and out of every crevice, the unceasing swarm of a public with their digital cameras dutifully proliferate the scene, sending digital parcels off to distant lands, marking off a tourist’s checklist.

“Look at the ship!” Across the water the parodically enormous cruise ship, “Sapphire Princess,” is docked at the Rocks, bringing Sydney Cove to brimful. “You went on a boat, but not that boat?” Passing by, a girl of about eight is clarifying family folklore, and her clean, enunciated Australian accent – the fresh diction of childhood – contrasts her grandmother’s soupy Mediterranean cadence. “Yes. It was different. You couldn’t fly so easily then. We went on boats with two thousand people.”

My friend and I have lost the third in our group. We phone to track him down: ‘I’m at the front.’ Which front? ‘The harbour side.’ It’s all harbour side! We stalk one another clockwise around the building like cyclists in a velodrome, though our pace is languorous and the hour stretches on.

We circle to starboard, thankful for the shade and hush of the granite foundations. Peering over the railings—at thigh-height they are retro-low—into the precious-stone blues and greens of the Pacific, long strands of kelp can be seen floating serenely from the building’s base: an aesthetic flourish, the sub-aquatic adornments of a famous moored ship.

At the end of our circumnavigation, the obligatory gesture of coda seems to be to mount the stairs and touch the gleaming tiles. Two types, one smoother than the other, yellowed with age or off-white by design, march upwards in endless lines of binary. At a middle-distance the combined effect is mosaic. I raise uncovered eyes, my gaze skidding up the steep, curved surface, and squint into the glare of sun refracted. A bucket of glass shards has been spilt; the sun’s intensity scatters unevenly across the tiles. And beyond, the cumuli have frayed into wisps spread out across the sky.

A young man with a video camera walks up behind me and touches the same tiles as I move away, speaking calmly as he records: his family and friends’ own foreign correspondent. He wears lurid board-shorts, according to local custom, and the multi-khaki ‘hiking’ boots favoured by freshmen back-packers the world over. Local and universal, mis-matched and alert, here he is anonymous and far from home.

Making our break for the station, the first spoonfuls of rain begin to fall. From the platform, I watch an ancient drama unfold across the harbour. The water and sky have reset to a steely grey-blue, and the sweet, peaty tang, so strong with Australian rains, wafts up the escalator. When the train embarks, it is to the crack of an axe splitting ancient, felled timber in the sky.

conceptual art (also concept art) 

noun

art in which the idea presented by the artist is considered more important than the finished product, if there is one.

On the beach at Brighton in the south of England the shore is made up of countless pebbles. Beneath the weight of your feet they squeak and the give is more than on soft sand, so that to walk even the distance from the promenade to the water’s edge feels like a trial of uncertain outcome: each single step is not quite fulfilled to its assumed potential, and you begin to feel your mass is hanging back in your body and must be wrenched forward with great effort.

We went there one day in March and despite the sun, the air and water were still very chilly, and also very still. I was with three friends I knew well, and a fourth lanky fellow I had only recently met. One of my friends, a girl named Samantha, lay down on the pebbles very still and after some time she asked us to cover her. To heap the pebbles onto her in handfuls would have hurt her because of their weight, and so my friend and I placed them upon her body one-by-one.

Each pebble was a slightly different hue of the tan of the shore as a whole, and would have had an average oblong diameter of about five centimetres. Their weight could be felt in an open palm, but could then be easily thrown some distance out into the water.

My friend and I worked quickly and methodically, first of all placing some onto her stomach, and then around the outline of her legs, torso and head, working to build up a foundation. As the pebbles began to build up around her she seemed to be becoming encased from underneath. After some time we had covered: her legs, her crotch, her stomach, her torso, her arms, which she lay crossed over her chest with the palms of each hand flat against the flat above her breasts, her neck, and her hair. We had to fill in the gap between her two thin legs, and around where her feet angled upwards a broader foundation developed as the pinnacle stones kept slipping down from atop her toes. With the stones built up around her head, and after she repeated her authorisation, we placed the pebbles carefully onto her forehead, over her ears, into the hollows beneath her cheekbones, onto her chin, and then onto her cheek bones, her brow, and with smaller pebbles on the space above her top lip, below her nostrils. She was now almost unseen, even in her black clothing, and was just another mound of pebbles amongst the other mounds that rose and dipped all along the coastline. Up close all that could be seen were her nose, her lips, and her grey eyes, which looked straight ahead. And then, we placed a few final stones over both of her eyes, now closed, and over her mouth and the bridge of her nose, so that all that really remained exposed were her nostrils through gaps in the rounded pebbles.

We told her to make a sound when she wanted us to remove the pebbles because we realised now she probably could not have gotten free by herself.

We sat back. Some people walking by closer to the water looked back at the small mound, noticing what we had done, but they must have sensed no cause for alarm, with four of us sitting there nearby, and the lanky fellow reading his book the whole time. I rubbed my hands together, and found they were now pleasingly coarse and dry, as though setting. The stones slowly shed a fine dust as they grind together under their own weight, or people’s footsteps, and so the squeaking is in fact the sound of their own disintegration; I thought that some way beneath where I sat, it probably all gathered together as silt.

After a few minutes, long enough for my mind to momentarily forget about her, we asked Samantha if she would like us to remove the pebbles and she said through nearly closed lips, Yes, and then, when I asked again to be sure, she said, Yes, again, but more forcefully in a way that would seem rude if she had spoken English as her first language.

Squatting beside her, the same friend and I quickly removed each stone one-by-one, starting at her face and head, then at her neck, and so on, down her body. She lay still while we removed most of the stones that covered her and only moved her body when she had been almost completely freed. As she went to sit up some of her hair that was caught pulled sharply.

Afterwards she said it had become very cold beneath the pebbles, and she said she did feel she couldn’t have freed herself, but that she had liked the sensation of the weight upon her body. I remembered her as saying it had felt like ‘the weight of everything,’ but that phrase sounds much too contrived for her, and is probably my own confection. I remember thinking at the time that I would have liked to have the same experience, and now, in fact, when I recall it a trick in my memory makes me feel the sensation of the weight of all those pebbles on my own body, my own arms and neck and torso, even the sharp pull on my hair, though it is something I never experienced.

He wakes up 50 minutes after he had intended, and when he checks his phone the alarm he set last night didn’t go off and wasn’t set. To save time, he thinks, he does not make his bed.

There are a number of things he does before he puts the kettle on, which should be the basic act: he walks up and down the house a couple of times, realises his flatmate is at work, and then he pulls out from the fridge and the cupboard the dozen or so grocery items that will go into making his elaborate breakfast and looks at them on the bench.

Before the kettle has boiled, he has put the tea into the pot, but usually he waits until after the kettle has boiled to do this, to allow a moment of time for the water to retreat from boiling point so it will not scorch the tea leaves. Instead, to fill in this time, he decides to cut the thick white spines from the silver beet so it will be easier to digest, but there are many pieces and the task takes so long he forgets about the boiled water.

When his breakfast is almost ready, he walks about the house to canvass where he will sit to eat. There is lots of sun on the front landing, which is near the street, but in the back courtyard there is a table that he can move into sunlight. He walks from the front door to the back door two or three times, and he also considers the kitchen table, before settling on the back.

Outside, the meal is big, and he tries not to rush, especially with the silver beet, which requires a lot of chewing. In between mouthfuls he puts down his utensils and looks about him at the trees and the blue sky.

In the shower, he needs to wash his hair: shampoo, repeat, and then conditioner, which he tries to leave in for at least five minutes, during which time he will brush his teeth. But under the hot water he keeps forgetting this order: he waits five minutes with shampoo in his hair instead of the conditioner; he forgets about brushing his teeth until minutes after he has put in the conditioner. The sequence of the things he has set himself to do: soaping, rinsing, drying; toilet; brushing hair, sunscreen, seems to have been stretched out, like beads on a cheap elastic bracelet.

In his bedroom he quickly puts on underpants and a pair of jeans, but then, as he is standing without socks looking between four different coloured shirts, he sees that before he leaves the house he will have to make his bed, which stares uglily at him now that the bright sun is coming in through the window.

When he has collected his keys, he runs over what tasks he is actually heading out to do, but the few things seem cluttered now, and too much for the couple of hours, which is now all the time he has to spare.

I dropped my phone, and the result is that its microphone doesn’t work, but its speaker, and everything else, works perfectly fine. This means that when someone calls me, I can hear them speak, but they are not be able to hear me.

I don’t like talking on the phone very much, so I have been content with this arrangement for over two months now. I still answer most calls I receive and it is quite entertaining to hear people on the other end of the line, speaking uncertainly into my silence, saying my name two or three times, then waiting a few moments before hanging up.

I can still SMS, and so after I receive a call I will usually send a message explaining the situation. Some of my friends, perhaps a certain type, seem to enjoy the anomaly and continue to call me, freely speaking their information in quizzical tones. And seeing as most phone conversations are just exchanges of basic information, like telling someone you are running late, this works perfectly fine, and I can either message a reply if they have asked a question, or simply absorb their message without replying—if they are running five minutes late to meet me, then I just wait five more minutes.

To other friends with whom I am in less frequent contact, those who live interstate, for example, I might have explained the situation a number of times, but they will fail to remember, or will assume that after a couple of weeks I must have fixed my phone, or gotten a new one, as they would have done. With some friends, perhaps a certain type, I can sense a growing irritation.

I haven’t spoken to my mother very much since I dropped my phone. During a Skype conversation we had organised a few days in advance, she joked that perhaps I was only pretending my phone was broken in this improbable way so I can legitimately avoid calls from her, with phone calls from mothers supposed to be tiresome for adult children. But, in fact, it will be because of my family, who all live either interstate or overseas from me, when I eventually do get my phone fixed.

My brother does not have a computer, just a phone, so at the moment I can not either call him or Skype him, though we probably have a lot of news to share. I did speak to him once a couple of weeks ago when I had to call him from work because of an emergency. Afterwards, after the emergency had reached some resolution, I wanted to call him again to thank him for his help, and I saw that to send him an SMS would have been inadequate. On my way home from work that night I stopped at a public phone and called his mobile, and dropped about $10 worth of coins into the slot as we spoke for around 10 minutes.

I said before that I could still send SMS, but at the start of this week my credit for the month ran out and I am yet to buy more. At $29 it is fairly inexpensive, but after I ‘recharge’ I am told by the phone company that in fact I have $150 worth of credit, and it is this larger amount that seems to be going to waste considering I would usually send only one or two SMS each day. Over the past week if I received an SMS I would either wait until I eventually saw the person, as with my flatmates or someone I was going to meet, or send an email or Facebook message as my reply. Meanwhile, and quite understandably, I have been receiving steadily less SMS and phone calls over the past two months, but then in turn this makes buying credit seem even more unnecessary.

When I was speaking on Skype to my mother, she said slightly ironically that on Monday, for my birthday, she would send me ‘a text, or something.’ I know that my mother and father would like to call me for my birthday, as would my brother and my sister, and for this reason I thought that I should fix my phone by then.

As well as my immediate family, there is a handful of friends who live interstate who would probably call me for my birthday, but I can’t say this for certain because, when I think now, I didn’t necessarily call them on their most recent birthdays, and may have only sent them an SMS, or a short private or public message to their Facebook account. There are a couple of friends who will probably choose to send me an SMS, which seems somehow a bit more thoughtful or intimate than public Facebook messages at least, which sit there amongst so many others all alike. There are a few friends abroad, who I would love to celebrate with, but some of them don’t use Facebook, and I can’t be certain they’ll even know it is my birthday.

Most likely I will receive a number of nice messages on the wall of my Facebook page, but, again, I can’t really be sure about that either. Last year at this time I had temporarily deactivated my Facebook account, and for the past couple of years I have lived in a number different countries and cities, so it is possible that for many people, the habit having been disrupted, I will no longer be someone they would be sure to wish a happy birthday to. I know this has happened for me with many people.

Also, whenever I see on Facebook that it is someone’s birthday, and there are scores of messages, all the same, wishing them a happy birthday, I find there is frequently a slight formality to the postings, or a slightly laboured jokiness, which makes me think many of the people leaving messages are not actually very close to the person whose birthday it is. I don’t often post on people’s walls when it is their birthday, and, now that I think of it, when I do it is usually someone who I like but I am not very close to, or someone who I have fond memories of having liked at some time in the past, or someone who I like but would like to know better, rather than a friend, who I would rather send a private message to, or SMS, or even call, or even visit.