watervole | (no subject)

Saturday was a good day; actually, Saturday was a very good day. In spite of various problems with public transport.

I got up early enough to be able to get

waveney to drive me into Poole to catch the 8.30 train with the aim of arriving at Waterloo around 10.30 to meet up with

greengolux.

Problem number one. The train didn't just take the scenic route, it took a very scenic route. What the heck, they have to do engineering works some time. I had a good book on invertabrates with me, so I relaxed and learned more about tarantulas, fleas and ground beetles.

Arrived in Waterloo an hour later than intended. Thank Heaven for mobile phones.

greengolux was forewarned. We met up quickly at the station and after a quick consultation we decided to stick with our original plan and visit the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery as it was very close to Waterloo.

I'm glad we went. Even though it cost 9 quid, it turned out to have much that was of interest.

greengolux and I seem to have a lot of shared interests and one of these is perception and vision and how what we see isn't always what we think we are seeing.

The exhibition had many interesting items, but there were several that particularly interested me. The high spot was the Ames room. I'd always wanted
to see one of these ever since I read about them in an OU psychology course. The room iteself is distorted in a way that makes clever use of the rules of
persective. The result is that when you view the room through a peephole, the brain is tricked into seeing the room as square. When someone is standing in the room, the brain tries to use what it thinks it knows about the room and you perceive their height in proportion to the percieved height of he room. This gets really weird when they walk across the room and they literally double in height before your eyes. The effect is even greater when there are two people and they move around the room. One can easily appear twice as tall as the other in spite of them both being the same actual distance from you. I really really wish I'd had more time to spend on the room, but I had to allow time to get to the ZZ9 AGM and the room had a queue (and of course, I only thought of all the really clever experiments after I'd left).

I dived into the underground and got as far as Green Park before discovering more joyful transport problems. The circle and district lines were having engineering work, which meant the Picadilly line was massively overloaded. We actually had to queue in a tunnel for around 15 mins in order to get to the platform. It was getting pretty hot by the time we got onto a train to Hyde Park Corner. From there I found the pub fairly easily thanks to the map on the back cover of 'Mostly Harmless'.

I was a little late, but not too badly.

I'd wanted to come to this AGM for one particular reason. I wanted to vote. It didn't particularly matter who or what for, it was the principle. Horizon, the Blake's 7 fan club, is run as a dictatorship. If you disagreed with the club's policies (always assuming that you could find out what they were), there was no way in which you could affect them. ZZ9 hold annual elections and vote on matters affecting their constitution. I'm a political animal. I always vote in general elections. Even when

waveney and I are voting for opposite political parties, we still go and vote. If you don't exercise your right to vote, you have no right to complain about the government. Also, I'm not quite so cynical about politics as everyone else seems to be. Occasinally, I watch the parliament channel. I find it soothing to watch people debating subsidies for rural bus services, or discussing the finer points of the law as it affects asylum seekers. Even when I disagree with the person speaking, I often find their points to be well thought out and to involved issues that I hadn't previously considered. TV and newspapers gloss over everything and add their own bias. To see politics in the raw is to be reminded that decisions are taken for complex reasons by people who do actually care about what they are doing.

Thus, I enjoyed the AGM and actually changed my opinion on one particular issue after hearing what people had to say. I enjoyed listening to

dougs and

lproven doing their respective speeches as to which of them should be ZZ9's new president. Their speeches were essentially the same in matters of principle, consisting of "vote for the other guy".

dougs was obviously more effective in his buck-passing - grin- as Liam got elected.

We had a pub quiz which our team won by a whisker. I knew some of the Hitchhikers questions, none of the songs, managed a few of the initials, succesfully got the name of a hypothetical planet that no one else knew, but managed to prove my complete and utter shallowness by knowing the answer to the tie-breaker! Yeah!

I had to leave before the auction. There were items I would have liked to bid on, but I suspected the trains would still be running late on the way home and I turned out to be right. I finally got home on the dot of midnight, having had a throughly enjoyable day and convinced the lady I shared a taxi with to buy the Hitchhikers audios for Xmas.

ZZ9 are my kind of people. Maybe next year I'll propose a motion that they give a bit of money to Douglas Adam's favourite causes. He was like me in that regard, a man concerned for our vanishing wildlife. A very funny man, and also one who cared.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If you don't exercise your right to vote, you have no right to complain about the government.

That depends on why you don't vote. You may not approve of any of the candidates, but they are still using your money so you have every right to compalin about what they do.

So, stand for election. If enough other people feel the same way, you might be able to change things.

First, it costs a lot of money to stand for election. Secondly, the parliamentary system means that an individual getting elected on an independent ticket has virtually no influence at all in Westminster. The alternative is to build a new party, which takes a lot of time and effort that most people don't have. Therefore, such people who don't like the choice of candidates they have are perfectly entitled not to vote for them and every right to compalin about what they do.

The Australian system has compulsory voting at general elections -- you get fined if you don't turn out to exercise the democratic right that previous generations died for. And it has preferential voting (and proportional rep) which has the great virtue of allowing you to vote against the candidates you most want to keep out. Even in Britain, with its primitively medieval first past the post cross in a box, you can work out which candidate has best chance of keeping out the one you really don't want to get in.

Or, if you're in a virtual one-party state constituency (as we have been both here and when we lived in Pimlico) you can vote Green just to show you like the principle, even if their party policies are unconstrained by the practicalities that having a chance of getting in would require. Besides, their local candidates tend to be mates of ours, and need all the help they can get to hang on to their deposit. Cheeringly though, at last Euro- and London elections, even in darkest Labour Tottenham our Green candidate was within half a percentage point of the magic 10%.

Oh yes, I love the Australian system. When people get shocked at the compulsory voting, I point out that it simply demonstrates the sensible attitude that voting isn't a right so much as it is a duty, and therefore fining is perfectly reasonable.

And preferential voting allows one to vote for whom one really wants, without having one's vote wasted.