Europe on Two Martinis a Day - Part 8 (The Road Home)

Having arrived in Greece, I relaxed a bit, since it seemed more likely that we would make it home before our interrail passes ran out. We would have liked to spend an extra day or two in Greece and at least see Athens, but time pressed, and all we saw of Athens was the station before we sped on to Thessaloniki, which was where we had entered Europe.

Thessaloniki is a pleasant place. My Turkish friends say it's like Izmir before that city was swollen by migration from the East. Like many Greek towns, the coastal strip is full of cafes frequented by young women with expensive shoes, short skirts and long legs (or maybe it's the shoes and skirts that make their legs look long, like the optical illusion with the pillars of the Parthenon), while the less expensive places are full of cafes frequented by old men.



As I said, the women of Thessaloniki like to dress up. "Athenian women are all frumps," said the assistant in the shoe shop. Ah yes, another shoe shop. Our quest in Greece was to find Nalan a pair of gladiator sandals, and after traversing Thessaloniki from end to end, we found them. This meant that pretty much everything had been crossed off the European shopping list, so we could relax and reward ourselves with some first-rate sea food.



From Thessaloniki, the journey home was easy. The night train between Thessaloniki and Istanbul is the most comfortable I know. Normally I won't pay extra for a sleeping car, since most sleeping cars are like moving barracks, but the Philia-Dostluk Express has proper sleeping compartments for two, ideal for couples who want to act out their steamy train fantasies or just break the no-smoking rules. In typically Turkish fashion, after showing us how the beds unfolded, the guard said "Oh, and if you want to smoke, just close the door and open the window."



I should conclude with a description of majesty of Istanbul, gateway to Asia, complete with references to the Orient Express, bazaars and mosques, but I don't have it in me. Istanbul is home, or pretty near home. The exotic has become the familiar and vice versa: the quiet orderliness of Vienna is now more exotic to me than the noisy chaos of Istanbul. Travel may indeed broaden the mind, but migration turns it inside out and back to front.

Breaking News

I am a great believer in coincidence. Many of my friends, from old-time occultists to newly-arrived New Agers like to say "There is no such thing as coincidence," but I am deeply convinced that if, for example, I turn out to have the same birthday as one of my students, this is a coincidence. We aren't soul-mates, we don't necessarily have anything else in common other than the usual things that go with being human … we just happen to have been born on the same date, about thirty years apart.

However, I am starting to see more than coincidence in the fact that so many times when I switch on BBC World to watch Click, I am frustrated because there is Breaking News. I don't know if it's synchronicity or conspiracy, but the universe, or at least the BBC seems to be trying to stop me watching my favourite tech programme. In this case, Click was cancelled because the jury in some terrorism case had just reached a verdict. Some guys had been convicted of trying to blow up planes, and another one had been acquitted. And this, which would only merit a few minutes on the main news, gets stretched out to half an hour because they've over-run the break between the news programme and Click, so rather than, God forbid, starting the next news programme five minutes late, they have to find something to fill the space in between. They do this largely by asking the man on the ground inane questions like, "Can you explain for us again what is meant by 'conspiracy to murder persons unknown'?" For God's sake, you moron, it means that they plotted to kill some people, but we don't know who the people are, because in this case even the plotters don't know who they are.

Now I admit that this is newsworthy. After all, it's not every day that people try to blow up planes. But this interruption of our normal viewing rests on two illusions. The first is that it is essential for us to get the details of every news story the minute they are available. Now obviously we like our news to be reasonably up to date, otherwise it isn't news, it's history, and it is on the whole a good thing that news media have progressed beyond the point where we received news of battles after the war had finished. But would it really hurt people to wait thirty minutes to get the full story? Would it be abandoning journalistic ethics for them to say: "The verdict is out in the British plane-bombers trial; one defendant has been acquitted, the others found guilty of one or more charges; tune in to the five o'clock news for the full story"?

The second illusion is that tech news is not real news, whereas people trying to kill each other is. This is odd, given that news is supposed to be new. A robot controlled by artificially-grown rat neurons is new. People trying to kill each other for religious reasons is about two thousand years old. News is also supposed to be about events that effect large numbers of people. This event did indeed affect a lot of people, but only because it meant that airport security was tightened, it took longer to get on a plane, and passengers risked their tubes of face cream exploding in the hold because they couldn't take them in their hand luggage. In contrast, OLED technology (which I'm guessing would have been a major story in the missing Click) will affect far more people, not simply because it will provide better quality pictures than LCD; it will use less energy, and thus play a small part in preventing the Apocalypse. Tech news is important news; even gaming news is important (and at least as important as all that sports news) because gaming technology drives IT in general.

I wait in hope for the day when I hear "We now interrupt this broadcast of the opening of parliament to bring you breaking news of the latest Ubuntu release."

Almost Original

I just posted the following to the Second Life Educators' list:

So I think what distinguishes virtual worlds is not so much the medium as the fact that they are simulacra of already-existing worlds. The VW may be a nigh-on complete simulacrum like the Matrix, or it may simulate some aspects of an existing world and create others anew, like SL or WoW. If a computer-mediated environment were to attempt to create a totally original world then it probably would not count as virtual, but then it would be hard to identify it as a world either. "It's Second Life, Jim, but not as we know it."

I was most disappointed to find, after a quick search, that I am not the first person to coin that phrase: someone called 2E Leven came up with it first. There's nothing new under the web. [Quick Google check. Yes, that one's been done too. This is getting like the South Park episode "The Simpsons Already Did It."]