Over the years the definition of apophenia has broaden from a specialized medical condition to be used as a more general description of the mental states of gamblers, paranormal believers, religious believers, conspiracy theorists, lotus and mushroom eaters. The underlying impulse is the search for causation. It is difficult for a person to accept that randomness kicks out all kinds of events that aren’t casually connected. Promise a casual connection and you’ll find an audience for the connectedness you are pedaling. Politicians and economists exploit this mental need daily.

In Thailand, when someone famous is killed in a car crash. Thousands of people will buy a lottery number based on the number of the registration plate on the crashed car of death. Apophenia. Parliament is opened after consulting astrologers or monks (or both) for the auspicious time for the opening. Or a new cabinet minister wishes to arrive at the office at the most auspicious time to start his job. Apophenia. Thai culture is no different from most cultures. Cultures around the world, politicians, pundits and priests tell stories riddled with apophenia. It is a behavior so ingrained that we no longer see it for what it is.

And of course, apophenia is necessary condition state of mind for writers of fiction (and non-fiction). A mild case of apophenia is a novelist’s secret weapon that brings readers and literary success. We spend our working days seeing spontaneous connections between unconnected events, people, and lives, and weaving meaning into those connections.

We experience a scene, a smell, a sound or a taste and our automatic impulse is to fill the patter into a story. Think of the last time you were on a train at 10.30 p.m. in a major city. The rush hour has flushed down that the time drain. People on the train that time of night are different from the rush hour crowd. Have you looked around and thought about possible connections among the strangers riding in the same carriage?

There’s a middle-aged woman holding a boutique of flowers leaning in a space near the door. She could sit down as there are empty seats. But she stands with her flowers. Across from her is an older man. They are likely strangers. But you see a connection. They have matching gold bands on the third finger of their left hand. You suddenly tell yourself they are married. They are poor. They don’t have a car. They’ve been out celebrating a wedding anniversary but it didn’t go well. They had an argument and aren’t talking. He gave her flowers earlier, and now they are a mockery of the silence between. That’s apophenia. They are actually strangers. They’ve never met. They will never meet. Except in your mind.

Seated down the car are three workers in matching light blue uniforms with dark blue collars. There is a company logo over the front right pocket. The three women are in their late twenties. Two of the women are slightly overweight. They sit together. The third woman, who is prettier, sits four seats away between a retired man and a teenager with a New York Yankees T-shirt. They are going home from work. They are office cleaners. The two women sitting together have received pink slips from the company. This is their last day. The money in their pocket is all the money they have. The woman sitting apart has kept her job. The two women who have been laid off believe she has been giving sexual favors and that is why she has been kept on.  In fact, when the three got on the train, there were not three empty seats together. They were separated not by choice but by availability. They haven’t been fired.  It is another workday, and they will be back on the job tomorrow.

That is a simple train ride. Someone with apophenia makes these spontaneous connections throughout the day, in every setting, and out of all the unrelated people, events and objects that she has experienced. If your mind automatically switches into this method of assembly of people and events to tell a story, then you have the right mental stuff to be a writer.

There is a bit of insanity in a writer. Normal people—meaning those who rarely write out of imagination (except for expense account vouchers) live in a different mental world. One separated by how one goes about interpreting patterns, meaning, and purpose from ideas, thoughts, images, objects, the driftwood of materials that lands on our beach each day.

Apophenia is our brain trying to make sense out of unrelatedness of things and people we experience. We recoil from randomness and chaos. We don’t go around telling ourselves there is a pattern in everything, and that, if one peers long enough, there is a connection of meaning. But our behavior suggests that we don’t have much free will to do anything but continue to make such connections. What appears to be ‘noise’ in the system is merely an invitation to an artist to interpret the ‘noise’ as have a relationship among the parts and those parts put into a whole suddenly are meaningful.

Most people can’t resist being seduced by such connections.

People who claim to see images of religious figure in a toasted cheese sandwich or in clouds are an example of apophenia. It isn’t only religious people who suffer from this condition. So do gamblers who see connections that aren’t there. Astrologers, mystics, drug users, and others occupy a world where the lego bricks of reality are all around them and they spend their time assembling castles in the sky.

Films like the Twelve Monkeys and The Matrix tap into our inner desire to embrace apophenia. Blue pill, red pill choices of how much apophenia you can handle is an enduring metaphor of The Matrix. Films like these tapped into that apophenia that lurks below the surface in many people, drawing connections between all kinds of unrelated persons, events, and places with patches of non-linearly woven into the fabric of the story. Philip K. Dick, the science fiction author, took drugs, which he claimed opened a gateway to a secret knowledge or insight into an underlying, unseen casual agent that connected everything, fleshing out a deeper meaning. He also thought that he saw a stream of gold light radiated from a fish necklace.  Drugs. Did I mention, Philip K. Dick linked this vision with the drugs he’d taken?

Mystics and religious figures take apophenia to the logical extreme—all of the world is information and all of that information is interconnected. Seeing this unified oneness is enlightenment.

An epiphany is making a connection between two unrelated events that illustrate a deeper meaning, and underlying casual connection others have glossed over or ignored. Science has such moments.

A powerful emotional experience can create the need to creatively connect that experience with unrelated events. Kurt Vonnegut’s novels are an example. During WWII Vonnegut had been a prisoner of war in Dresden. He was in the city when Allied bombers fire bombed it turning “the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.” Slaughterhouse Five was his way of connecting the unconnected into a meaningful story of massacre. Other novels danced around that event, drawing from that experience.

What vests a fiction author with the mantle of credibility over another author who can turn a phrase just as well in the contest to attract the attention of readers? Many factors come into play. But one element does matter when we read a narrative that asks us to believe in the connection between people, events and it can be summarized in three words: “I was there.”

I bear witness to the experience. I saw the bodies, experienced the terror, suffering, pain and horror. On the train, I saw the woman holding flowers on her way somewhere. I connected her, the flowers, a stranger across from her into a story. Other people in the train had their faces in their iPhones or iPads, with the connections uniting their world being made online for them in a digital world. The nature of what we mean by ‘experience’ is evolving from the world of Kurt Vonnegut. We shelf life fire exercises for computer simulated games. Predator aircraft for manned fighters. Slowly we are removing ourselves from the world of first hand experience where all that unrelated, confused, and random bits float, collide, bounce off each other, waiting for someone to connect the dots.

Readers still seek to know the meaning of unrelated things and events. We thrive on clean, cool, compelling connections, ones that give us a sense that our ideas of causation have not been violated. Chaos makes us frightened and lack of casual connectedness frightens us even more. Evolution has wired apophenia into us allowing us a convenient way to experience the world. Even though some of the attributed causation may be false, or the connections turn out to be dubious and phony, apophenia is what gets you through the day and night. Rather than a definition of insanity, at the least in the mild forms, it may be a precondition to remaining sane.

We look to the imagination of an eyewitness to bring us to where he or she stood and we want to know what it was like for the small golden fish to radiate the meaning of the hidden universe where all things are connection in a vast empire of information.

Next time your financial advisor or best friend emails you with a surefire way to make a financial killing, you can reply that you are waiting for the average rainfall in Vancouver in October to correlate with average number of tourist arrivals in Bangkok for the month of December in order to trigger a sell order for your shares in Apple and to execute a buy order in gambling casino business in Cambodia.

After you finish this essay, pick up any newspaper, go to any blog read what the writer has to say, or flip (or scroll) through the book you’re reading and give the author a rating on the apophenia on a scale of 1 to 10. Assign a ‘1’ is for no connections of unrelated events or things. Give a ‘10’ for so many such connections and offering a causal bridge linking them all that the person is insane or enlightened. Remember the greater speed in making patterns from data, the higher the IQ. That’s right. This is what is tested when given an IQ test. We have a cultural bias that we all buy into—slow pattern-making means a person is mentally less capable, less bright, and less able to pull together, assemble the correct pattern in front of him.

It seems we suffer either way. When a person finds it difficult to draw patterns from unrelated symbols, events, or experiences, means he has a low IQ. But the person who easily finds the underlying causes that spontaneously brings meaning to unrelated things has a high IQ. How effectively you deal with such pattern making determines whether you are crazy, stupid, or on drugs. Finally ask yourself, what rank would you assign to yourself in the way that you connect unrelated events and experience.

After all, one thing is certain: Only you can say “I was there.” And only you can also say that in Twelve Monkeys and The Matrix only an imagination created that space. No one was ever ‘there’ and the Hansels and Gretels gingerbread men are not the same as a 135,000 people who had been incinerated while Vonnegut had survived. The science fiction inside Vonnegut’s head didn’t spring solely from his imagination; his way of connecting events came from the way things had been connected during his WWII experience. Everything Vonnegut wrote connected back in one way or another to his experience of the firebombing. He had been there. And he took us there with him, connected us to those events through his novels.

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To celebrate Aung San Suu Kyi’s visit to Bangkok, Christopher G. Moore’s novel “Waiting for the Lady” will be given away for those who have a Kindle or ebook software on your computer on May 29-31. Yes, it’s FREE! Three days only!

www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest novel is Faking It in Bangkok.

No sooner had I zapped those musings into the ether, to be read and appreciated (or abused) by virtual millions, than I was faced with another example of journalistic/authorial victimhood. In a review of the vastly overrated Jonathan Franzen’s new book of essays, poor Jonathan is described as heading off to the South Pacific to do some bird-watching and to recharge his batteries after “a grueling, boring book tour.”

Oh, sure, it’s tough traveling around talking about yourself and your work and your intellectual interests to people who take the time to buy your books and read them and are still interested enough in you to want to hear your other thoughts. Book tours are neither boring nor gruelling. Climbing K2 is grueling. Reading Jonathan Franzen is boring.

If your book tour is boring, that’s because you or your book or both are boring. If it’s grueling, it’s because you lack the meditative quality that allows you to simply be where you are, doing what you’re doing (and therefore you get “bored” because you’d rather be back at your desk where you’re a “pure” artist, than, say, talking to lovely people about your books in Hamburg with the impure intention of getting them to buy more books.)

The second amusing aspect of this (for there is, as pseudo-intellectual Franzen might write, a stereographic plurality of meanings here) is that the Times highlights an essay by Franzen in which he tells a graduating class at Kenyon College to get their noses out of their social networking devices and experience the world. Somehow a book tour doesn’t represent the real world to him. The South Pacific does. But the fast-disappearing bookshops of America are merely boring and grueling.

As a former journalist, I understand that there’s a degree of what I call cliché-habit involved in the word choice here. Schedules have to be “brutal” and book tours are “grueling,” just as Saddam Hussein was always the “Iraqi strongman,” until we found out he wasn’t.

But writers who go along with such descriptions will end up seeing their role with a negative, self-pitying slant. If you’re a writer who thinks your schedule is “brutal,” you’ll feel exhausted. You’ll write tired old shit with no spark to it. If you’re a writer who thinks book tours are “boring and grueling,” you’ll end up flouncing on your bed with a box of tissues and a tisane like any number of luvvies from Truman Capote onward, because the world is simply too much. You’ll never enjoy a book that truly grips you and tells you about the world in which life is lived; you’d rather be bird-watching in the South Pacific and writing stories of domestic life that are so pedestrian they find themselves described with that other most dreadful of clichés: “seminal.

–

I’m upset because money now has only a fraction of the value it did a short time ago, most people have no concept of what little value it does possess, and having created this public mindset, the political-financial complex no longer has the slightest qualm about raping the consumer in every way they can conceive.

I’ve been considering buying an apartment here in Helsinki. Nothing fancy. Not downtown nor in an expensive neighborhood. Just one bedroom, one bath, fifty to sixty square meters. The places I’ve looked at have either been in neighborhoods that yesterday were considered blue collar, and many thumbed their noses at them as beneath them. Alternately, a great number of apartment buildings are in the process of being built in the suburbs of Helsinki. One is expected to buy pre-construction, based on a floor plan. Either way, the average cost is around 250,000 €. That’s $320,000. That’s insane. A package of rye bread: $3. A package of normal coffee: $7 Need to call customer service lines: about $2.50 a minute. I have to pay people to talk to me so I can discuss products I purchased from them—so they’ve already turned a profit—or about some good or service I require. I pay them to beg them to take my money. My bank, which makes a fortune from interest I pay them, charges me to chat with them about how they’re fucking up my electronic payments.

But this particular story begins on February 17^th of this year. Simplistically put for expediency: residents of apartment buildings in Helsinki, for the most part, have no choice in internet service provider. The owners negotiate with providers and you’re stuck with the decision they make. On that date, I was forced to change service providers. Said new provider did not provide until Feb 22^nd. I need the internet to make my living. The new provider runs on dinosaur technology via telephone line, requires a special router and Ethernet cable setup. My computer doesn’t even have a goddamned Ethernet port because so few people need them anymore. I received two instruction manuals, one out of date and one for the wrong product. I had to borrow a computer, download manuals and software onto a memory stick, and figure out how to make this piece of shit setup work. It took me three days. I had to change email addresses and inform 2,000 people. I’m still not receiving emails sent to my old account. I would guess un-received emails now number in the hundreds. How much time and money has this forced changeover cost me in time and money? I have no idea.

I own a domain name. It comes with email service. I bought it through Godaddy.com. I decided to run my email through it so I would never have this problem again. Godaddy has no automatic setup software for Microsoft Outlook 2010—now an old product—and it has to be set up manually. In the process of setting it up, I called their support line three times. They gave up and suggested the problem was on Microsoft’s end. I went to Microsoft support and found that thousands of people had the same problem. No fix was available. I thought about it for a couple days, figured out how to resolve the issue, and I was up and running within a few minutes. So I could figure out a fix when neither Godaddy nor Microsoft could? Bizarre. I emailed Godaddy and offered to trade them the fix in return for discounted services. They declined. They prefer to leave scads of customers unsatisfied than provide one with a discount. That’s how much they care about the people who pay their salaries.

Last week, my computer malfunctioned. Microsoft Office, which I use several hours a day, went down. I tried to ininstall/reinstall. It wouldn’t accept the product key, because the computer broke once before, it went back to the factory where they replaced the hard drive and along the way changed all the key codes without informing me. I called Microsoft and asked for a new product key. It was given to me. Great! Except that it was a key for a trial version and, given that I had run Office before, my computer wouldn’t accept it. On my third call, the CSR said he was unauthorized to give me a key, and suggested I call the vendor of purchase. Said vendor apologized, but had no idea why I would be told such a thing, as they had no control over licensing.

I had purchased a three year warranty with my HP Pavilion and dutifully filled out the registration and warranty upon installing it. I thought I would call HP and ask them how to find my product key, which exists somewhere in the computer. But Wait! I had failed to fill out a SECOND form for the extended warranty, which, despite the hefty sum I paid for it, was now null and void. I could purchase personal support for the bargain price of $99 a year. Un-fucking believable.

I made two more calls to Microsoft international support. The first time, I was disconnected. The second time, I was asked if I was in Ireland. “No, I’m in Finland” “What time is it in Finland?” the CSR asked. I said, “It’s 9:30 p.m.” “I’m sorry, we can only help you during business hours.” “OK then,” I said, “it’s 9:30 a.m. in Finland.” I shit you not, this is true. She didn’t skip a beat. “Thank you sir, let me connect you with tech support and they will help you.” They did not help me.

Let’s pause a minute here. Microsoft only offers personal service during business hours. How many people today, with jobs that require constant computer use, only work during business hours? Here in 2012, most of us work long hours, continue working at home. Work weekends. I’m sometimes still working at 3 a.m. I have deadlines. We’ve paid for operating systems, software, warrantees. The software is now usually downloaded. The only cost to Microsoft is R&D. Yet, we can’t have twenty-four hour support? Why? Because they couldn’t give a flying fuck less, that’s why.

Once again, after working my tiny tiny brain very very hard, I figured out how to make Microsoft Office work with a trial product key, when their support staff could not. Hence, I’m able to write this. I have a mental picture of the support staff being a roomful of trained monkeys on roller-skates

Then another funny little thing happened. Facebook started using Timeline, the latest of their vast improvements. My novel, Helsinki White, came out recently and my FB traffic had been heavy: 1000-1250 hits a day. When Timeline kicked in, traffic dropped to less than half that. I wrote it off to the vagaries of fortune. Then I learned my posts were no longer reaching on average of 84% of my FB contacts. Why? I’ll skip all the shit about algorithms. The bottom line is that if you want your posts to reach their intended audience, you must pay, depending on which “plan” you choose, $99-$599 a month.

How is this happening and why? Because there is no respect for us, the consumers. Bill Gates has a net worth of well over $60 billion, Mark Zuckerberg about $3 billion. The acquisition of that much wealth means that they could have offered us quality goods and services at reasonable prices and still become tremendously wealthy. Instead, they chose to rape us.  I have a feeling that they not only don’t respect us, but in a sense despise us as their dupes and pawns, serfs in their digital feudal system.

Why do certain events and names keep creeping into my thoughts? French Revolution. Robespierre. I can’t imagine what sparks those little words, like a song stuck in my head. Can you? Bill, I don’t really want to fight you. I want you to treat me and the millions of people who have made you so rich with respect. I want you to divest yourself of $50 billion dollars, use some of it to improve your goods and services, and the brunt of it toward charitable works. Think you can make it through retirement with only $10 billion? Put yourself on a budget. Clip coupons. I bet you can manage it.

James Thompson

Helsinki, Finland

20.5. 2012

 James Thompson is an established author in Finland. His novel, Snow Angels, the first in the Inspector Vaara series, was released in the U.S. by Putnam and marked his entrance into the international crime fiction scene. Booklist named it one of the ten best debut crime novels of 2010, and it was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Strand Critics awards. His second Vaara novel, Lucifer’s Tears, released in March, 2011, earned starred reviews from all quarters, and was named one the best novels of the year by Kirkus. The third in the series, Helsinki White, was released on March 15 to critical acclaim.

www.jamesthompsonauthor.com

FB: James Thompson author

Twitter: tassu15

In the last month there’s been a veritable shit-storm here in the UK about the opinions of a woman called Samantha Brick. Back in April she wrote an article in the right wing newspaper ‘The Daily Mail’ protesting that her good looks have always alienated her from other women. They are apparently so jealous of her appearance that they spurn her, accuse her of trying to seduce their husbands and none of even her best friends have ever asked her to be their bridesmaid. Women on both sides of this debate (sorry for Brick, infuriated by Brick) have nearly had coronaries as a result of that article and the follow up television interview that she gave. Some really spiteful invective has been employed which has, if anything, underlined Brick’s point about attractive women being a persecuted minority.

Clearly Brick is aggrieved and I believe that she has a certain point. But my point is, so what? Whether you look like Cheryl Cole or the minotaur is neither here nor there – actually. The reality is that people will always find something they don’t like about you and that’s a fact. As women, we are brilliant at this. I can clearly remember being pigeon-holed as the ugly clever girl at primary school. It wasn’t a lot of fun but I had to be something because kids in general, male and female, move in tribes. If you’re not the ugly clever kid, or the pretty girl, then you’re the fat boy or the speccy kid or you’ve got spots etc., etc., etc. The difference for women is, I believe, that with us this carries on into adulthood. Or rather the value attached to it does. Clever women are admired and feared sometimes too. It’s daft to deny it. But they don’t have the sort of commodity value that beautiful woman have. For instance I cannot and never have been able to blag free drinks a la Samantha Brick, from men in bars or on planes. I’ve had a lot of spirited discussions with strange men on subjects as diverse as psychology, history, taxidermy and sexual politics, but I’ve always bought my own drink. But then that’s a bit of an old feminist thing because I am a sweet old fashioned old style feminist.

When I was a young woman in the 1980s feminism was a very active beast. Betrayed by the UKs first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, we protested against the closing down of the mines, about unemployment, about the demonisation of single mothers and the prejudice against gay men and lesbians. One of my friends was a ‘Greenham woman’ part of the semi permanent women-only camp on Greenham Common protesting against the siteing of Cruise missiles on British soil. No-one really gave too much of a shit about whether they had their hair straighteners with them when they threw eggs at the police. We were fighting for equality and not just for ourselves but for all oppressed people at that time. Maybe because I am an old git now, I still think that that is valid. But then women still do have real battles to fight and they will continue to do so while they don’t have equal pay with men, while women and girls are trafficked for sex and while the term ‘child bride’ actually relates to a person living in the modern world.

But then, as I’ve just said, I am an old git whose face is marked by the sands of time. I’m not very down with what I believe some call ‘the new feminism’ or ‘post modern feminism’. This, I am led to believe, consists of women manipulating men to do what they want using beauty and sex as levers to success. So living off blokes just like our ancestors – but with breast implants and faces that can no longer frown. Mmm. Seems like a whiff of sexual slavery has entered the building to me as well as an echo from the distant past, plus a pinch of ‘all men are bastards’. I’m not impressed, but then this is just, to me, another manifestation of the ghastly ‘celebrity culture’ that I hate so much. Just because the glamour model Jordan boldly goes and marries loads of men, makes more and more money from the publicity around it and then has so many Botox injections that she declares herself to be in some sort of plastic surgery ‘hell’ – from which she makes yet more cash, does that mean I want the young women in my family to do likewise? Well, no. Good luck to Jordan if that’s what she wants to do, but is it a feminist statement? No, it’s just the same old crap women have been doing either by choice or because they’ve had to since the dawn of time. If I had a daughter I would much rather she trained to be a nurse than go into glamour modelling. I’d be much prouder, even though I’d know she’d always be relatively poor. She’d be contributing to society and using her mind and her body to help others.

Samantha Brick and those who both support her and hate her, need to get over themselves. Perpetuating the prejudices of the playground will not help women more forward. I’ll be honest, I OBSESS about the author photographs of me on my books because I know that even though, as writers, we live in darkened rooms and smell of dust and cats, the public need to see pretty female writers – or so we are told. But I also know that it’s shallow and silly and boring too. I want it to change and I’m angry with Samantha Brick for starting a debate that contributes to the crap and doesn’t do anything to change it. Because her ‘beautiful versus not beautiful’ thing was divisive, it made women look silly and that’s a retrograde step.

Dear Ms Brick, if you and I went into a bar together, you’d get a load of drinks paid for and get hit on for sex, while I’d have a conversation about cognitive behavioural therapy and buy my own drink. Deal with it. I do. Looks? They are what they are – now can we just move on, please?

Practically with tears in his heavy-lidded eyes, he graciously announced that he would. Iceland’s hothouse media, which had been churning out the wildest speculation on who might or might not be tempted to stand for the job was suddenly confused. Hadn’t he said he was standing down..? Was there something we missed…? There was some backtracking through the tapes and, no, he hadn’t said anything of the sort but in true political tradition he’d left his options open.

ÓRG is a thoroughly political animal. Over the years he has gone from being a left-leaning political maverick to a champion of the out-of-control free-market economics that haven’t done Iceland too many favours. His greatest mistake was probably to back the banksters as enthusiastically as he did. Subsequently refusing to ratify parliament’s IceSave bills by sending the issue to consecutive referenda, he avoided making unpopular decisions and saved his own political skin while also dealing a couple of body blows to the already weakened government, made up partly of old opponents he doubtless has little affection for.

He has politicized the office of president, using the presidential veto for the first time. Previous incumbents had kept the presidency firmly clear of politics, refusing to take part in the divisive issues of the day and keeping a distance from the vicious political squabbles being fought out in parliament and the media.

Iceland has a tradition of not unseating a sitting president. It’s considered tasteless to stand against a president in office and those who have tried are normally seen as unelectable. Previous presidents have comfortably seen off rare rival candidates, but this time things look very different and the candidates are already lining up with half a dozen in the running. But the race is already looking to become a two-horse contest between ÓRG and Thóra Arnórsdóttir, a young, smart and generally well liked TV journalist.

She’s media-savvy, as befits a regular presenter of the state broadcasting station’s top news slot. Thóra already has a sizable head of steam behind her emerging campaign and she has a couple of aces. One is that she’s not ÓRG and as such doesn’t have the same weight of political baggage and the unspoken links with the old boys’ network of business and politics. The fact that she’s not a grey-haired man in a sober grey suit isn’t going to do her any harm.

In a race that looks like a battle of new blood vs the wily old guard, the ante is being upped as candidates for the presidency may have to enter the fray on an increasingly political footing, notably on the hugely divisive issues of fisheries and EU membership.

ÓRG has already rounded on Thóra with an outburst in an interview that could easily backfire against him among those who are uncomfortable with the politicization of the presidency. In return, she merely wished him a happy birthday on her Facebook page.

Two months is a very long time in politics and Thóra Arnórsdóttir’s campaign has got off to a flying start with the real danger that her visibility could peak and fade well ahead of the election itself – although her circumstances are awkward. She has taken a break halfway through the presidential campaign to have a baby. Outside the Nordic countries this would raise a few eyebrows, but in Iceland hardly anyone is going to turn a hair. The present government has at least three MPs, including two ministers, who have taken maternity leave during its present term.

In theory, Ólafur Ragnar should be eyeing his chances dubiously, maybe even regretting not having stepped down gracefully when the opportunity was there. Nobody would have thought any less of him for having done so, but the electoral machine is now fully engaged and gathering momentum.

Knowing how Iceland’s conservative voters tick, it’s a good bet that ÓRG may be able sit tight and watch his opponents split the opposing vote between them. In a three- or four-horse race, he’d probably come out on top. If the other presidential hopefuls can be whittled down to a single candidate opposing him and with a clear appetite for someone fresh and less political at Bessastaðir, he could find himself facing retirement. Not that the old fox is going to go quietly or without pulling a few rabbits out of his political hat.

In the South of Thailand there are many rubber plantations. Rubber trees require fertilizer. The essential ingredient of fertilizer is? One assumes it is poo. The people who make fertilizer, like all good capitalists, seek to maximize their profits from every bag of fertilizer. If this becomes a highly regulated business where the government sets the price, then one way to boost the profits is to sell the farmers “fake” fertilizer. It is difficult to believe that there are cheaper substitutes for poo but apparently that is the case.

What the English language newspapers in Thailand fail to say is the “fake” fertilizer story has shit hitting the fan in more than one ASEAN country. What seems to be an eccentric story from Thailand is actually a story that is spreading through the region. America had the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2008, while Asia has a subprime fertilizer story in 2012.

Vietnam also has bad boys diluting the fertilizer in their country. In Vietnam, test showed rather than 20% of organic content, the fertilizer has less than 15%. What’s a farmer in a remote area without testing to do? That’s the problem. Remote areas where the fake fertilizer is used won’t really know the problem until their crop yields tell them. The Vietnamese authorities responded with a crackdown, raiding five companies selling the fake shit. But with fines being on the light side, the crackdown won’t solve the problem. The Vietnamese solution is for the State to get into the shit business. They’re building a huge fertilizer factory. I am certain we can revisit this story in a couple of years to see just how well that solution worked.

Not to be left out of the biggest shit story to hit the region in years, the Philippines is also investigating fake fertilizer in Mindanao. The police seized thousands of bags of fake ammonium sulfate, ammonium phosphate, urea, muriate potash, and monosodium sulfate salt. This happened after the cops found the safehouse where the fake fertilizer gang had warehouses.

Tempo reported:  “The suspected leader of the gang, Edgar Calledo, and seven of his workers were caught mixing, rescaling, and resacking of suspected adulterated fertilizer products inside a warehouse in Maa, Davao City.”

They were caught red-handed. It would be good if the local reporters kept us informed about the trial of that gang of corporate thugs. How this is any different than the average derivative trader on Wall Street would require a separate essay. But I am certain by now you can see the general theory is roughly the same. Only on Wall Street, they mixed shit in with the good stuff, while in this region, to save on the cost of shit, they put in the fake stuff.

The problem can be traced to government capping the price of fertilizer. That is called price control. It means that to keep farmers and producers of agricultural products contented voters, the price of shit has to be kept below market price. If the manufacturer is a state enterprise, then the taxpayers subside the true cost of shit. But if the price control is on private manufacturer, and the cost is  rising, you would expect one of two outcomes: (1) the use of fake materials that cost much less; or (2) a refusal to manufacture and sell their product at the controlled price. The first is fraud, the second is civil disobedience.

According to the Nation,  in Thailand, fertilizer producers and retailers have put the government on notice they won’t be selling any more of their shit under the government’s current price structure. The national stocks of fertilizer are dwindling. The government is looking to import fertilizer from Malaysia to fill the gap. The government is caught between farmers who want cheap fertilizer and fertilizer companies that want a profitable return on their investment.

The lesson is that even shit has a market price and when the government policy is the private sector has to bear the cost of production even though this not only wipes out their profit margin but puts them in a loss position, something has to give.  The alternatives aren’t pretty: fake fertilizer, fraudulent fertilizer gangs, black market fertilizer, and damaged crop yields.

Wall Street bankers and Southeast Asia fertilizer manufacturers have more in common than anyone would have thought. They could recruit from the same pool of executives who know the best techniques of getting people to believe that a little fake shit doesn’t spoil the crop yields.

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www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest novel is Faking It in Bangkok.

I’ve always considered myself lucky to be a writer. True, I work long hours…compared to the purely idle rich or to a top soccer player who puts in a tough 90-minute week. But essentially the burden on a writer is less the hours spent at writing – which ought to be fun – and more the occasional pondering about one’s self-worth, about one’s writing itself, and about one’s status in the author’s pantheon from piffling to powerful.

Which is why I was amused by the caption to The New York Times’s article this weekfeaturing crime writers who’re now being asked by publishers and agents to write short stories and extra features to help publicize their novels – or even to write a second novel a year. (In the print version, though not on the web) the caption told us that Lisa Scottoline works “a brutal writing schedule” which sees her tapping away from 9 a.m. “until Colbert” comes on at 11.30.

My great-grandfather had a brutal schedule working in a Welsh coal mine. The Chinese who make the little plastic thingamy bits of crap I toss out every day have a brutal schedule. A hooker has a brutal schedule. For your schedule to be brutal, your work also has to be brutal.

No writer has a brutal schedule. In fact, no one who works in an office has a brutal schedule. Long hours in an office are boring, but not brutal.

The Times article led me to consider the pressure on (and personality of) the mega-selling thriller writer type. I’ve bumped into a few of them at book fairs. I’ve found them to be mostly contented, charming and fun, and yet… they all seem to feel a good deal of pressure from agents and publishers. In the past (and still, no doubt) that pressure was limited to the desire of the agent and publisher that Ms. Megaseller would resist the temptation to write a standalone novel and come up with another in their hugely popular series. The writers in question never seemed keen to do yet another installment of “McIrishname and the Gimp,” or whatever their series was called. I found it more than mildly astonishing that even with millions in the bank, all these writers claimed to find it hard to resist the blandishments of their publishers.

As if the nearly bankrupt denizens of the publishing fraternity would dump Ms. Megaseller if she put McIrishname and the Gimp out to grass for 18 months, while she knocked out a stand-alone about a murder during the Westphalian pumpernickel crisis of 1384. (I’ve a mind to send a proposal on that to my agent…)

Equally: as if publishers might put aside their fear of a future of thin e-book margins and dump Ms. Megaseller if she didn’t write two novels in a year.

Now I’ve been known to do a bit of extra stuff for my good readers. I’ve made videos for my books. I’ve put out some short stories for Kindle. I’ve even recorded an album of original songs about my books. I’m willing to go that extra mile. But there’s a risk to producing more than…well, more than I produce.

Some time ago I asked my agent — while she was lunching me on sushi on Park Avenue during a three-week break in my brutal writing schedule – if she thought I should try to write two books a year. I pointed out that I was quite efficient and that I wrote quickly and didn’t really work very long hours. I could up the productivity, perhaps, if she thought it’d be good for my career. She told me I shouldn’t.

“Because one of the two novels a year might be crap?” I asked.

“Weeeeell, no,” she said. She’s very polite. She’s from the Midwest.

I twigged. “Ah, you’re worried BOTH of them might be crap.”

She nodded and pushed the sushi boat my way.

Writing too much during the course of a day drains the creative energy. Larry McMurtry has said you ought to stop before you’re played out, because otherwise you’ll be mentally too exhausted to pick up and continue the next day. I assume McMurty quits long before Colbert comes on. (I assume that, as a 76-year-old who lives near Wichita Falls, Texas, old Larry’s in bed before Colbert comes on.)

The message implicit in the Times’s quote from an Oregon lawyer who downloaded a short-story by Lee Child that was a teaser for a forthcoming novel (“I’ll give anything he writes a shot”) is that it doesn’t matter if a mega-seller writes crap. (Notice the appreciation and, yet, the lack of enthusiasm in that quote.) Plenty of people will still download it.

Michael Caine once said that he made three movies a year. A brutal schedule. “Two of them may be rubbish,” he said, “but one of them will be good, and that’s the one people will remember.” It won’t work that way for books. (Unless maybe you get a stable of little writer- chimps to bang them out for you, and even that doesn’t seem to work on a literary level, though they do sell, which proves my point. Anyhow that’s for another blog post.)

Meanwhile, I’m working on a short story about Caravaggio, which I intend to publish for digital download shortly before the July 1 UK publication of my novel about the great Italian artist “A Name in Blood”.

I assure you, it’s not crap.

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Don’t get me wrong, I am not making light of the hoarders themselves. Hoarding is an illness that can wreck lives and ruin relationships. Back when I used to work in mental health I once had a conversation that lasted a whole morning about one sheet of newspaper from the late 1970s with a hoarder whose house was almost uninhabitable. Only the kitchen table (which he slept under) was still clear. No, it’s the ‘fashion’ aspect that bothers me.

If I’m honest, all through history, fashion has dictated the way human beings respond to misfortune. Back in mediaeval times people with scrofula and leprosy were high on the agenda. The latter needed running out of town as soon as possible while the former lived with the vague hope of touching a king and being cured. It was a sort of fame and was far more popular than just simply dying of starvation which was so common it hardly merited comment. In Victorian times it was all about consumption and dying rather prettily with a little rose shaped splash of blood on your pillow. So called ‘lunatics’ and those with syphilis were very unpopular (unless the syphilitic was royal of course) and it was really better to just top yourself than be so utterly unfashionable.

In recent years having some sort of truly ghastly and embarrassing complaint has been a sure fire way of grabbing those all important 15 minutes of fame. This is all quite aside from the crazed shenanigans of ‘reality’ nonsense like ‘Big Brother’. Something called ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ is the worst offender. This is a programme about a small team of doctors who roam the countryside looking for people to show them their anal fistulas, vast skin flaps and deformed knees. There is no lack of takers, let me tell you. Switch on the TV at about 8pm and there is a chance that you may well find yourself looking up the sort of arse that you’ve probably only ever seen before in a nightmare.

I tend to hide behind the sofa until I can locate the remote control to switch the TV off. I regress to my childhood when I used to hide from the Daleks in exactly the same way. But I am a rare bird. ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ is enormously popular serving as it does, the triple function of providing freakish entertainment, giving the rest of us that wonderful ‘thank God I’m not like THAT moment’ and underlining what we all know about how intimidating most doctors are. Why HAS that man lived with a vast cyst on his penis for the last 35 years? Because he is too ashamed to show his doctor who makes him feel like crap anyway because he is diabetic. Again, I’m not blaming either the people who appear in this programme or even those who watch it. It’s why it exists and its ‘fashion’ element that rankle.

And of course, to finally get to the point, fashion applies in the world of crime fiction too. It can cover location – at the moment it’s all about Scandinavia – types of crime and offender, police investigators versus PIs, women as opposed to men. It goes in cycles which are unpredictable and often unintelligible. Trying to second guess what might be the ‘next big thing’ in crime fiction is of course the Holy Grail of most mainstream publishers. But I have an idea.

Years ago I worked with an agoraphobic rent boy. He never went out, clients came to him. So if that is possible, how about a crime solving hoarder of Swedish origin? Effectively locked into his house of newspaper towers and rat gnawed pot noodle cartons, people shout their problems at him across a vast sea of precarious plastic bags and clothes from the early 1980s. Armed only with a broken Ikea chair leg, he battles both crime and his demons in what was once his kitchen, bringing Britain’s most appalling murderers to book using his keen sense of justice and the psychic power of thought.

I’d love to write that, I think it would sell like hot cakes. Sadly I don’t have time to do it at the moment. Being just ‘the thing’ i.e. a crime fiction writer, takes up all my time right now. But maybe one day. It’s that or ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ and I know which I’d prefer.

Some of us have been sick of it, and fail entirely to understand the appeal of the Titanic. All right, it was a big ship and it sank. A lot of people died of hypothermia as they bobbed in the Atlantic waiting to be rescued in their cork lifejackets. A great many mistakes were made at the time and since then a great deal of time and effort has gone into locating the wreck and filming every detail of the crumbling iron structure.

Fair enough, I can understand all that. The loss of the Titanic was a turning point for many aspects of safety at sea that had been severely lacking. Would it be uncharitable to suggest that the impetus for this came from the large percentage of the survivors were better-off first-class passengers who had influence and who were listened to once their ordeal was over?

Leafing through records of maritime disasters, the Titanic actually pales into relative insignificance in terms of numbers. The nastiest peacetime maritime loss of life was in 1987 when an overloaded ferry, Doña Paz, collided with oil tanker Vector 110 miles south of Manila and caught fire before sinking with the loss of more than 4000 lives.

But the largest losses of life at sea have been calculatedly deliberate. A few months apart, Soviet submarines sank the Goya with between 7000 and 8000 German troops and civilians on board, and the Wilhelm Gustloff, supposedly carrying more than 9000 civilians and soldiers trying to escape westwards from the advancing Red Army. It’s very difficult to understand the mindset of the men who gave the orders. Did the captains of the S-13 and the L-3 know that their targets were full of desperate, escaping civilians? Did they care? Were they proud of what they had done? Did they become Heroes of the Soviet Union?

The litany of troopships and hospital ships sunk by submarines is staggering, and as a former seafarer, I can appreciate the horror of knowing there’s no escape and it’s cold out there.

Incidentally, one of the intriguing ones in the dispiriting list of ships sunk is that of the Lancastria, a British troopship sunk off St Nazaire in the early stages of the Second World War. A designated war grave, it seems that around 7000 lives were lost, but official reports will not be released until 2040 – so something or someone important must have been on board for the authorities to want to keep it under lock and key for a century.

The one that really lays a stone on your heart is the Ukishima Maru, a Japanese troopship that sailed for the Korean port of Busan a matter of weeks before the end of the war carrying (officially) 4000 people, but the ship is thought to have been packed with many more Korean forced labourers and ‘comfort women’ when an explosion sank it off the Japanese coast. Official sources claimed the ship had struck an American mine. Both North and South Korea (in rare agreement on this one) have claimed the ship was scuttled intentionally and charges had been placed before the passengers embarked.

But back to the Titanic and the whirlwind of nostalgia that has surrounded it for the last few weeks. What was it about this ship that struck a chord? The sinking was unfortunate, to say the least. It happened just as the shipping was entering a new era of technology – as was the media, which made a feast of the tragedy, imprinting it indelibly on the public consciousness and sparking an outpouring of public sympathy for the many survivors who had been left destitute and the crews’ families who had been left breadwinnerless. It’s not mentioned all that often, but the Titanic’s owners discharged the crew on the date of the sinking and stopped paying them then and there.

The Titanic’s real legacy was that its loss led to the formulation of the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convention that still tries to prevent this kind of thing happening again.

All the same, some of us are pretty tired of hearing about the Titanic by now and would be grateful if it could just have a discreet veil drawn over it at last. But no, now an Australian tycoon has announced that he’s contracted a Chinese shipyard to build an exact replica of the Titanic – except that it’s not. It’s actually going to be a floating modern-day Titanic theme park. Nowhere would you be able to build an iron ship these days, so it’ll have to be steel. Instead of coal-fired engines, there’s diesel, plus it’ll have a bulbous bow as well, an efficiency feature not part of the original Titanic.

In fact, this isn’t the first time this idea has been floated, as a South African tycoon wanted to build a replica at the original Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast – but the idea was finally scrapped.

One would presume, and hope, that the new Titanic II will have all the 21^st century’s electronic wizardry on board instead of a radio officer hunched over a morse key. And hopefully it won’t be so true to the original as to be short of lifeboats when it sets sail across the Atlantic in 2016. But the SOLAS convention requirements won’t allow that – something we can thank the original Titanic for.

In South Carolina

A driver went to the trouble to find a replica of testicles. He displayed them in the back of his truck. The sheriff’s deputy stopped him and gave him a ticket. The motorist is back in the news. He’s got a second ticket for the same ‘crime’. One more time and that is three strikes and he’s out. A life sentence in a South Carolina prison where a set of replica testicles might not work out all that well for him.

In Florida

A drunk driver had his truck pulled over early on a Thursday morning by the police. He’d been clocked doing 70 mph around midnight. His companion who was riding shotgun was a ‘small monkey’. The police seized the truck and monkey and arrested the driver who’d had a history of DUI arrests. No word on how much the monkey had drunk.

In Munich, Germany

A 17-year-old biker made a point of giving the finger to one of those CCTV cameras that monitor the traffic. Not once but 26 times. He cleverly covered his face and removed his license plate. The police laid a trap for him at the end of a tunnel and the biker confessed to crime of displaying his middle finger at the CCTV camera.

It wouldn’t be a good German crime story with out further evidence that comes from a strong scientific background and understanding of procedures, permits and technology. It turns out the biker had the wrong license for the bike he was caught in carrying out his crime. No middle finger usage endorsed on the license. And the police technical expert said the 125cc bike was ‘illegal’ based on his assessment, allowing the police to confiscate it. The biker was fined, points deducted and banned for 26 months from driving. One month for every time he flipped the bird.

In Shizuoka, Japan

A fifty-year-old policeman was arrested after he approached a 25-year-old woman in a restaurant.  He crept up on her and began to lick her hair. The cop was attached a forensic unit and had been on a medical leave. The authorities were certain when the cop would return to work, or what crime, if any, to charge the hair licking forensic cop.

Pathum Thani, Thailand

One difficulty of being an identical twin is if your criminally inclined brother commits a criminal act, flees the scene and leaves you to take the heat as the witnesses identify you as the bad guy. Back in November 2010, Anek Ounwong had a fight with a group of teenagers and he used a grass cutter in what sounds like a bonsai attack on them. Anek, as often happens in these circumstances, didn’t stick around and headed for the hills. Last week he went home to find that his brother had received a four-year prison term of the grass cutter attack. The brother had tried to explain to the police that it wasn’t him. The police refused to buy his “I am a twin and my evil brother did it” story as did the trial and appellate courts. Now Anek is back in town, he’s gone to the police and confessed he was the attacker.

What was the reaction of the police? “It’s out of our hands. We can do nothing.” But the police suggested a course of action. Anek might want to petition the prosecutor’s office or the courts and explain to them what had happened.

As cases are known to move through the Thai criminal justice at a vast speed, it takes about four years before there is a final outcome—just the right amount of time for the innocent brother to get out of prison. Then the prosecutor can launch a new criminal case against the twin who committed the crime.  I doubt Anek will be able to claim credit for the time served by his brother. Though he might try. No doubt the authorities will adjust criminal statistics on assaults with a glass cutter which might well half the number of cases for 2010.

What these and many similar cases show is the role of bad luck, bad companions, bad brother, and hair licking police in the day-to-day criminal cases that happen right around the world.

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www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest novel is Faking It in Bangkok.