It is impossible for me to treat the current economic collapse with anything but a hint of amusement. That’s not to say it doesn’t worry me at all - I was watching the new very carefully whilst waiting for the details of the recent nationalisation and sale of Bradford & Bingley, since I have a savings account with them which contains most of my money. I would not like to lose that, of course.

That said, though, I have for several years treated the very notion of the modern economy and money itself with a great degree of skepticism. A few years ago I wrote a quasi-satirical article for a now defunct website (alas, the way-back-when machine hasn’t catalogued that particular article) giving a brief history of the concept of money and illustrating that it is now, essentially, an un-claimable IOU with no inherent practical value. And that’s in its everyday, physical form, the notes and coins we use (with decreasing frequency). Most money nowdays doesn’t even exist in reality, it’s just represented digitally on some bank’s computers someplace. Which is why the current situation is somewhat entertaining to me.

You see, for the past few months, but with increasing frequency of late, huge figures have been floating around. Figures like $700 billion or £400 billion, and then there’s the collapse of several large investment banks or the fact that certain major UK banks lost almost half of their value in one day. It all sounds very serious, of course. All these massive numbers, sums of money, are almost totally incomprehensible to most people. Actually, the global financial markets and national economies are the only time figures of this scale ever appear (outside of Zimbabwe, where you’ll likely find them in shops again in a few months), and these are things which we in the western world are all convinced are hugely important. But I’m not convinced.

See, although these vast sums of money seem as though they should be incredibly important, and the economic problems will impact everyone by making things marginally more expensive to buy, there’s one simple fact that people overlook. None of this money, these vast sums, actually exists. And even if it did, it would have no inherent practical value. It’s not as though any tangible, useful, physical thing is lost in all of this. Half of your food doesn’t disappear from your cupboard when your bank’s share price halves. So the fact that everyone (that is to say, the media) seems to be treating this as though the very source and sustenance of life on earth is failing seems rather absurd and thus entertaining to me.

The human brain is often a rather useless thing. Or at least, mine is. Up until Friday, I had been without internet access at home for three weeks, which is probably the longest period of time I’ve been without internet for six years. But it’s still only three weeks, and I still had access from my university library - a 30 minute walk, but since I have nothing else to do at the moment, one I made every couple of days - and I’ve been using the internet a huge amount for probably almost half of my life.

So I really don’t get why after only three weeks, having the internet suddenly feels weird. It’s as though I’ve been without access for far longer and I need to re-acquaint myself with everything. For instance, several times over the past few days, I have found myself wishing I had some helpful way to look certain information up, whereas previously curiosity automatically led to opening a browser and checking wikipedia. I’m not sure what should bother me more though; the fact that my brain is so quick to forget things that it’s been doing for years, or the fact that I consider not automatically knowing what to do on the internet to be a problem. It should probably be the latter.

In the least, I suppose it is a demonstration of how quickly it is possible to adapt to such changes of circumstance. Which I suppose could be helpful if anything drastic were to change in the world, like electricity suddenly ceased to exist. Though that seems unlikely.

I’m not really one to follow sports, the only thing I can bare to watch regularly is NHL Ice Hockey and since that’s on pay-per-view here now I can’t even watch that. Anyhow, apparently the Olympics are on at the moment. I note that we’re beating Australia, but obviously being British I won’t gloat about such things because that would be terribly impolite and improper of me, that sort of thing is for those vulgar colonial types.

Anyhow, the current Olympics are nice and all, but they’ve stirred up the news about London 2012 again. The other day I was reading a BBC news blog post about them, and how they will not be as grand or expensive as Beijing, which was not really news at all, but still attracted the usual BBC website comment thread idiots. I can’t be bothered to find the article now because I’m incredibly lazy, so instead I shall do my best impression of the comments:

The olympics are a waste of money! All the benefits are going to London and the south east! Why should be [Scottish/Northern/Welsh] money go towards them when we don’t get any of the benefits! The government only cares about the south east!

The government will make a total mess of the games and we will be left an international embarrassment! We’re incapable of doing anything like this!

Sebastian Coe is a Tory! I don’t trust Tories! They will ruin our country! Boo Tories! Labour yay!

There were some positive comments as well, but they were generally less stupid. Anyhow, my favourite reason that people don’t think staging the Olympics is a good idea is this whole cost thing. The estimated total cost is about £9billion, which admittedly is a fairly large amount of money. Now, see, I’m not going to contest that there aren’t more worthwhile things that this money could be spent on. For example, at current tuition fee levels, this money could put 750,000 students through a full three year degree course in the UK. It could be spent on environmental measures or space programs or somesuch.

However, I still disagree with cost as an objection to holding the games, because although there are better things the money could be spent on, that is irrelevant. I mean, look at this in context; without the Olympics, the government would have ~£9billion, sans whatever portion of that is lottery money, to spend on whatever they wanted. Which essentially means it would be almost entirely wasted on ill-thought-through reforms to whatever public service is flavour-of-the-month and blowing up foreigners because we disagree with their government.

At least with the Olympics we get something fairly impressive looking for our money, even if you do think it’s a waste.

It’s true, I’m rubbish at it. I went and let the whole ‘real life’ thing interfere with my duty as someone who has Internet access and webspace to inform you all of what I think about everything from politics to giraffes.

Though actually having to do stuff (dissertation, exams, post-exam drinking, post-post exam drinking hangover), is only part of the reason I haven’t actually posted anything new to this site in just over two months. It’s also because every time I actually think of something to post here, it occurs to me that either:

1. Hordes of other people would’ve made the same points about the same things, albeit probably in a way which makes an irritating amount of sense as opposed to my preferred method of not caring if I make much sense.
2. Whatever I was considering writing about is not really that interesting, and I am just really bored so it seems more interesting than it is at the time. (For instance, I almost wrote a blog post cataloguing some of the graffiti on the walls of my university’s library. Though some of it is fairly entertaining.)
3. I am actually a very lazy person.

I don’t consider myself a ‘blogger’, mostly because I much prefer to ramble about things that other people probably don’t care about purely to satisfy my own desire to actually write something, but also partly because that would make me feel like I’m trying to become part of some ‘cool’ blogging ’scene’, whereas I don’t really give a crap what most people on the Internet think, and probably never will. And it’s probably because I don’t consider myself a blogger that I let the above points stop me from writing stuff.

But now I’ve realised that not just blogs contain redundant repetition of facts and opinions which no-one else really cares about, the whole Internet is like that. So I can run a website - not a blog - and still enjoy those privileges. Besides, no-one actually reads this bl-, uh, website anyway so it doesn’t matter what is here.

Incidentally, a month or so ago when my room was being invaded by ants, I found myself wondering if giraffes are aware that ants exist, giraffes being so tall and ants being so small. If you are a giraffe, please tell me if you know what ants (or other ground-dwelling insects) are.

This is the first in my new, probably-not-likely-to-become-a-series of posts about people who do things that I like. So, Paul Lister. You’ve probably never heard of him. I hadn’t. He owns some land in Scotland. Quite a bit of it, actually. And he released some moose and boar there recently (incidentally, I still prefer ‘meese’ as a plural of moose).

If you clicked the link and read the article, you’ll see he’s not planning on stopping at meese, but is planning to re-introduce a fair bit of native wildlife, including wolves, lynx and bears. This is something I fully support. Personally, I think the fact that large parts of Western Europe, and the UK in it’s entirety, lack any animals which may maul people is a great shame. Animals that maul people are good.

People are complaining about the idea, of course, because people are generally incapable of recognising good ideas. Firstly, there are local farmers who don’t like the idea because their livestock may be harmed. That’s what happens when you have livestock in areas with native predators. Stop whining. And then there are ramblers, who don’t like the idea of it being a fenced reserve because it may prevent them from walking there. I don’t like the idea of it being a fenced reserve either, I’d much prefer a general reintroduction, but that won’t happen. As for the ramblers, the simple solution is to include some gates along the fence so any ramblers who want to get mauled can.

To be honest, I don’t understand how there can be any opposition to this idea. Replenishing the countryside that we’ve been destroying for centuries shouldn’t be something people object to. Mr Lister sums it up well;

“We have covered our countryside with motorways, highways, buildings, golf courses and so on to our own benefit and satisfaction to the detriment of every animal that has ever lived there. I get quite angry when I think about the fact that when we want to put back just 1% of the Highlands, we get potential resentment from some quarters. When someone wants to come along and do something good for the native flora and fauna, we ought to put our hands up and get on with it.”