Sue Bailey

I don’t understand why they make it so difficult. Suicide booths, from Vonnegut’s vision of the fulfillment of patriotric duty, have become a joke – viz. Futurama, and Martin Amis. But it’s a joke no one means. You can’t go to the corner, pay your dollar and have it done with. You can’t catch the bus, or go to Switzerland. They’ve made it difficult.

And I don’t understand why. What the hell is it about being alive that makes everyone want it to be the only option? Doctors, who ought to know better, who ought to know that we’re all just an oozing puddle of piss and snot in the end, spend their whole careers hooking us up to machines that pump in artificial oxygen and electricity to keep us going. Pharmacists add stuff to pills to make us puke them back up again, and – if what I read on the internet is true – fuck about with drugs on a molecular level just so we can’t overdose, or if we do, so we’re left vegetables dependent on the aforementioned doctors, instead of dead.

How the bloody hell does any of that make sense?

“Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.” I know the historical background to this – the condemnation and forfeiture of the felo de se. But I think we’ve moved beyond that now. (If the Queen would like my collection of empty wine bottles and cheap paperbacks, I’m sure she’s welcome to em.) Surely it’s possible, now, that one can rationally decide that one no longer wants to live?

But still, this prohibition persists. Self-deliverance? Nope, return to sender. None of us is allowed to opt out.

I used to think it was religious. My father, on discovering that I (aged thirteen-ish) had been eating more paracetamol than was good for me, saying, “you know if you’d died, you’d've gone to hell.” Suicide is the sin against the holy spirit, apparently. The one that’s unforgiveable. Well, chums, see you in hell: I can’t imagine it’ll be that different. I’ll keep a couple of pitchforks warm for you.

It isn’t religious. Even those who are in favour of AS want to make it difficult. Tribunals, Lord Pratchett? Really?? He makes it sound like getting planning permission. And those people – those otherwise sane, liberal, libertarian people – who argue against pills and books about pills and websites that explain where to get pills. Do you know what you’re doing? You wouldn’t argue I couldn’t eat, read or fuck what I wanted: why do you arrogate to yourself the right to decide that I have to continue breathing, whether I want to or not?

I just want to be able to get on with it. I don’t want to spend hours, days, browsing internet forums full of miserabilists trying to find out if *this* and *this* and *this* mixed will work, will knock me out before it hurts, before I get scared, will cancel each other out, will just get puked back up because of what doctors have added in…

Why? It’s my fucking life. I choose not to live it any more. Why don’t I get to make this choice?

Honestly, it’s Dorothy fucking Parker all over again.

Image stolen from The Telegraph.

I read the history of the internet. Maybe. Here’s mine.

• 1992: first time I heard anyone say the word “email” out loud (it was GreekBoy in the kitchen in Grantchester Meadows, talking about a dear but weird South African friend who’d overstayed his visa and gone on the run… I’d love to know what happened to him (South African friend, I mean; I know where GreekBoy is, he’s an all-too-easy Google-when-drunk))
• August 1995: B’s boss says he will buy us a PC for a wedding present. I question why on earth we would want one. B says “we can get the internet”. I question why we would want the internet. First browser Mosaic 2.
• October 1995: Dump Compuserve because of horrible number-based email address, claiming “I am not a number”.
• November 1995: first all-night-on-the-net session.
• December 1995: first time type “porn” into search engine (Yahoo, iirc). Police do not come straight round.
• 1997: learn HTML. Make own clickable home page with links to other favourite sites.
• 1998: register first domain name; set up first personal website; figure out something that looks like blogging; learn javascript. Win £800 on Birthday Bongs with Chris Tarrent: spend money on holiday in Egypt, make first “what I did on holiday” website. Was possibly last time went on holiday.
• 1999: first time get paid for making website. Put silly pictures of boss on “secret” page on company site: will later claim this as figuring “going viral” all by self.
• January 2000: boss says fatal sentence: “have you heard of eBay?” Then says “make me an internet shop in two weeks or you’re fired”. Later claims was joking; site finished anyway. PHP was learned.
• November 2002: Russian scammers plus eBay policy changes put paid to that cunning plan.
• February 2004: quit job to work for self on eBay-based thing.
• October 2006: start writing TameBay.
• April 2007: people want to buy advertising on TameBay. Start thinking there could be something in this blogging malarky.
• 2009: had enough of eBay. Wonder if could make living in some other way. Write fatal tweet: “I love WordPress, would marry it if I could”. This apparently enough to start over on whole brand new crazy rollercoaster.
• … to be continued …

Things I don’t remember: switching from Mosaic to Netscape; my Compuserve email addy; what it felt like when we first got broadband.

photo credit: Marc Lacoste

1. Socialists are better shags than Tories, but have much worse taste in fonts.
2. For such a non-materialistic nation, the French sure send out a lot of junk mail.
3. People with religious eBay IDs complain a lot more than average.
4. The longer English people spend out of England, the more likely they are to turn into Daily Mail columnists.
5. Women get personality transplants along with their new babies. Most opt for “tiger”.

Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News – Presentation at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex in Silicon Valley from John Temple on Vimeo.

Because some things deserve more than Tweeting (and also because my tweet got retweeted by an actual MP which is quite cool), I’m blogging this wonderfully frank, open-eyed assessment of why the Rocky Mountain News went under. Rupert Murdoch, I hope you’re watching (I also, tbh, hope your shitty newspapers go bust, but that’s an argument for another day).

Stolen from TechDirt, Post Mortem For A Dead Newspaper, which is one of the more beautiful blog post titles I’ve seen this week.

Someone – I don’t remember who, and Google isn’t helping me – once said that the English learn their history from Shakespeare and their religion from Milton. I’m a good Ricardian, so I protest the Shakespeare, though I’ve no objection to Paradise Lost as a scripture: if we have to have religion, let it at least be made of beautiful language.

It’s not just Milton and Shakespeare. Everything I know about Imperial Rome, I know from the pages of I, Clavdivs. There are vast swathes of English history (the eighteenth century, for example) that I know only by trying to figure out what 1066 and All That is joking about. Scottish history is Macbeth and Braveheart. And I’m entirely convinced that British government is like Yes, Minister (with shades of House of Cards) and American government is like The West Wing.

The British Museum has a new exhibition, devoted to Monteczuma, Aztec Ruler (doesn’t that sound like a Viz character?). Unsurprisingly, there has been a plethora of documentaries and press coverage on the Aztecs and their disastrous confrontation with Cortés… all of which has only served to remind me of my sole source of knowledge of South American history. Oh dear:

1. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”
2. Friday nights (absolute me time)
3. Birthdays (you should be spoiled unmercifully)
4. My computer (people who snoop deserve to find stuff that upsets them)
5. My laundry basket (I don’t want your dirty socks, and you don’t want mine)
6. My bank account (if you’ve ever heard a woman ask her husband for money to buy him a birthday present, you’ll never have a joint account)
7. Your right to say what you like; my right to say “not on my blog”.
8. New Year’s Eve
9. The ballot box
10. Being told the truth (I’d rather be hurt than lied to, a million times over. No one ever gets this.)

And you?

Someone accused me of being a consultant yesterday. Maybe, maybe…

(from My First Dictionary and Despair.com)

1. Cufflinks
2. Line-height: 1.6 (1.5 just doesn’t do it for me)
3. People with weird obsessions (I mean newt-fanciers rather than self-harmers, mainly)
4. The inside of girls’ elbows
5. Collar studs
6. Tired eyes (hungover eyes, at a push, on some people)
7. The Shipping Forecast
8. Earlobes
9. The Anglican liturgy (even though I’m an atheist. Must be BCP.)
10. Sarcasm

That is all. But feel free to write your own list.

Is it being Sunday that brings all the religious stories out? These two bear an uncanny similarity:

[A nurse] in Exeter said she has been removed from front-line duties for refusing to remove a crucifix. But the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Trust said its uniform and dress code prohibited front-line staff wearing any type of necklace. The trust said it would only be acceptable to wear a crucifix pinned inside a uniform lapel or pocket. The trust said it had tried to find a compromise, but wearing a crucifix was not a “requirement of Christian faith”.
Via

Tesco has been accused of religious discrimination after the company ordered the founder of a Jedi religion to remove his hood or leave a branch of the supermarket in north Wales. [...] Tesco said: “He hasn’t been banned. Jedis are very welcome to shop in our stores although we would ask them to remove their hoods. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Luke Skywalker all appeared hoodless without ever going over to the Dark Side and we are only aware of the Emperor as one who never removed his hood. If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they’ll miss lots of special offers.”
Via

Gotta give Tesco points for that superb response.