Charles on… anything that comes along

Greatly indebted to Seamus McCauley for his observation that, with Carl Icahn mucking about in the Microsoft-Yahoo thing

I am reminded of my long-standing hope that next on his list of takeover targets will be the McDonalds corporation. Because then, you see, every newspaper will do a headline saying “Icahn has cheezburger?”

Add him to your feedlist right now. kthxbye

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Slashdot gets sniffy: doesn't like its RSS feed getting slashdotted (21 February 2005; score: 32.65%)
• Minority Report, as it would be summed up for a broadsheet newspaper headline (26 December 2005; score: 32.23%)
• Sense of proportion department: the Daily Express today.. (27 July 2005; score: 28.69%)

So today I’ve been a good citizen. That is, a really disruptive internet break-the-mould stick-it-to-the-man citizen.

Started off being a citizen chauffeur. (OK, driving the family about. But you know, that’s doing a specialist job. Though why is it that if you stick “celebrity” in front of something, people don’t assume you’re the celebrity? If you called yourself a “celebrity chauffeur” people would assume you drove celebs about, not that you were famous and liked ferrying.)

Then moved on to being a citizen childminder. Well, actually, they were just my kids, so “childminder” might have been sort of overstating it a bit, since I didn’t get paid, and didn’t take any exams - but hey, not taking exams is the whole idea about being a “citizen something”. It’s about how you don’t do it.

Then I did a bit of work as a citizen electrician. Yeahhhh, really sticking it to The Man there. Rather than getting an electrician to come in and fix our light switch, I bought one, replaced the old one - having, yeah, switched off the electricity in that part of the house - and put it in. Lights work! Yeah! Come on! Citizen electricianery.. er, electriciany.. electricianing.. anyway, doing it yourself is the wave of the future! Come on, who wants their home wired? Well, I can do the light switches.

Then I did some citizen interior decorating. Yeah, we had a curtain pole that had to be put up. You know, there are people who would charge you good money for that sort of thing. They call themselves “decorators”. Come on - you know that the internet has empowered us to go to exactly the same stores that they do to buy our supplies and Change The World. So - me, a curtain pole, a couple of rawlplugs, a cross-head screwdriver. Oh, damn, a pencil. Down tools. Got the pencil! Oh, damn, a hammer. Down tools. Right! Set. Oh, damn, the rawlplug’s pulled out. Drill drill. It feels so good to be changing the world. If only the flipping holes in the poles would line themselves up. Trust me though - it’s the wave of the future. Soon we’ll all do our interior decoration. It’s going to change completely, baby. Skills in our hands.

So, with that done, and the curtain pole mostly level, it was time to do some citizen gardening. Well, mowing. But you know, that was damn good mowing. If hot.

And that’s not mentioning the citizen paddlingpoolcleaning, citizen chef-ery and citizen just plain reading that I’ve done today. I tell you, being a revolutionary is pretty hard.

Though I think I’ll leave it to others to do the citizen medicine, or citizen architecture, or even citizen policing. Some things, I guess, you need a little training for. I mean, I wouldn’t want to hear that the person trying to reset my broken leg learnt all her expertise from watching ER and House. Hell, I’d do it myself if I thought that approach would ever work.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The best definition of "news" I've ever heard (14 June 2006; score: 117.45%)
• Robert Scoble, meet happy slapping (20 July 2005; score: 69.39%)
• OK, here's the proper explanation of what's happening in 'Lost' (16 September 2005; score: 37.45%)

I’ve just read a piece that has been sitting in my browser for weeks: John Lanchester, writing in the London Review of Books, with a piece about why we keep not doing anything about climate change. Because we don’t. We do nothing. Real nothing. Total nothing. Nothing that’s going to make any change.

As Lanchester writes,

I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it. This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation: someone my age is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war, a subject which offered the same combination of individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe. Global warming is even harder to ignore, not so much because it is increasingly omnipresent in the media but because the evidence for it is starting to be manifest in daily life.

Through the piece (which checks in at 6,960 well-chosen words), he runs through the false dichotomy about whether climate change is “proven” (of course all science has uncertainty, but around the edges; it suits the oil companies, which like their profits today, to pretend the small uncertainty about detail is really Big Uncertainty about cause and effect); how George W Bush knows that the US is in a mess, and is pretty careful himself not to be caught out (his ranch in Texas uses geothermal heat pumps, and has a 25,000 gallon underground cistern to collect rainwater); how we just can’t look at climate change and its potential effects square in the face, because it’s simply too frightening:

ncreased melting in the Greenland and Antarctic is not included in these figures because there is not enough of a consensus to include its effects in the modelling. That isn’t reassuring. The Greenland ice sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by seven metres – which would mean the end of, for instance, London, Miami, the Netherlands and Bangladesh…

What would happen if the Gulf Stream (the Atlantic’s ‘meridional overturning circulation’, as it is scientifically known) were to shut down suddenly – the Day after Tomorrow disaster scenario? The prediction is that Western Europe would become 8ºC cooler, about the temperature of Canada. But Canada produces enough food to feed 30 million people and enough grain to feed 60 million. Western Europe has a population of about 450 million. So what would they eat? Hurricane Katrina gave us a glimpse of how quickly a meteorological event can destroy a city in the richest country in the world. We may be moving towards a future in which events like that come to seem commonplace. Anything in the paper today, darling? Not much – oh, all the Dutch drowned.

And then finally he comes to the question: how do you sort it out? I was surprised to find that he, like me, thinks that an accelerated (or at least urgent) programme of nuclear power stations is the right way forward. We’re both channeling James Lovelock, who points out that nuclear (fission) power

is a mature technology whose risks are understood, which would produce all the energy we need, and which is considered in the round the least worst solution to our urgent need for a carbon-free fuel source. It is not a prospect that brings much joy, and it is going to be of more than academic interest to see how the government gets round or forces its way past the inevitable local objections. We can all expect to hear a very great deal about how France gets 78 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power.

Which makes it all the more depressing to read rubbish at - of all places! - The Register, where some clown (Steven Goddard? Who he?) who’d like to believe that climate change is all a fix has written an article about Nasa’s readjustment of various temperature settings.

So what is the probability of this effort consistently increasing recent temperatures and decreasing older temperatures? From a statistical viewpoint, data recalculation should cause each year to have a 50/50 probability of going either up or down - thus the odds of all 70 adjusted years working in concert to increase the slope of the graph (as seen in the combined version) are an astronomical 2 raised to the power of 70. That is one-thousand-billion-billion to one. This isn’t an exact representation of the odds because for some of the years (less than 15) the revisions went against the trend - but even a 55/15 split is about as likely as a room full of chimpanzees eventually typing Hamlet. That would be equivalent to flipping a penny 70 times and having it come up heads 55 times. It will never happen - one trillion to one odds (2 raised to the power 40.)

Wow, a whole set of wrong suppositions. Who put him in charge of a web page?

1. who says it’s a 50-50 probability that the temperatures will be revised down or up? Perhaps they found the thermometers all had the wrong readings. Similar has happened - the ozone hole wasn’t detected because its detectors were set to ignore low levels. (Look, a Nasa page admitting mistakes.)
2. yes, the odds are (if we allow the previous flawed assumption) 2^70. That’s not the same as chimps writing Hamlet, which will be many, many orders of magnitude larger - it’s 2160 lines at performance length; assume 6 words per line (underestimate); that’s 12,960 words, or (average) 77,760 letters; chances of that being typed randomly, 1/26 * 1/26 * 1/26… = 26^(-77,760) or 1 in .. my calculator can’t do it. Astronomically larger than 2^70.
3. Flipping a coin 70 times and have it come up heads 55 times *will* happen. Not often - but you’ll get it before the monkeys finish. It’s absolutely *certain* to happen, some time.

And this is all before we ask why the joker writing this piece didn’t simply contact Nasa and *ask* them why the temperature readings changed. But no, that wouldn’t let him play up the conflict. He might have to find something out, rather than just questioning something that’s presented to him emptily. Kind of shocking for El Reg to let such rubbish through, to be honest.

Anyhow, that’s the second piece by John Lanchester I’ve read which has been fantastically informative and absorbing. (The other was about finance.) Must get subscription to LRB, I think.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Dreadful, truly dreadful: New Scientist on nuclear power (25 April 2006; score: 73.68%)
• Nuclear power? Yes please (8 July 2004; score: 55.13%)
• Environmentalists will embrace nuclear power and GMOs, and other contrary thinking (18 April 2005; score: 54.12%)

Kevin’s gone off on a bit of a rant-ette about the fact that Andrew Keen still gets airtime (which is definitely strange, but fits the pattern where people who say contrary things are repeatedly quoted; perhaps it’s the pig’s bladder effect).

Sure, it’s stupid that people ask questions like “Is new media killing press freedom?”, which makes as much sense as “Are biscuits the new washing-up liquid?” People are consuming media - that is, created output, including journalism of all flavours - more than they ever have before. It’s pervasive, inevitable, inescapable.

Keen’s not happy about it, though. It all boils down to something I don’t think Keen has quite grasped, but which I always try to bear in mind when writing a blog post, or a news story that people will get the chance to respond to.

It’s like this. Perfectly simply:

The rule is this: when I write the post, I know more about that particular topic than the average person who’s going to read it. But I don’t know more about the particular topic than some of the people reading it - so if I can get them to contribute then everyone (me and the other readers) will have benefited. (And of course if I don’t know more, or suspect I don’t know more, than the average reader, I should go away and find out some more until I do.)

The trick is in writing it in a way that will get those people who do know more to contribute it. That’s tricky. Takes practise. Maybe that’s what the new journalism is about: writing in a way that raises the amount of knowledge in the average reader’s head, while encouraging the reader further up the bell curve of knowledge to pitch in too.

Oh, the blog post title? Yeah, people like it if they think they’re getting self-help. Learnt that too.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Wait, no, don't stop reading this! (12 March 2007; score: 45.45%)
• Fire up the engine of serendipity: getting the database to mine the Long Tail of this blog automagically (22 March 2007; score: 40.46%)
• The Golden Rule for deciding whether to buy the album when you hear the single (26 May 2005; score: 38.72%)

So the Grangemouth strikers have realised that the fact that they’re essential to the running of a plant which refines huge amounts of oil and which in turn powers other oil-refinining plants gives them enormous leverage.

Yet the thing about this strike is that it’s not about pay. Not per se - it’s about pensions. The Grangemouth strikers have the plumpest pensions:

(Presently the top result on a “Grangemouth strikers” search is “why not sack the lot of them?” Obvious answer being “because it’s not an easy job”.)

The workers there don’t pay into a pension scheme; yet even so they get a final salary scheme. This has of course nettled Ineos, which is a bit of a Mr Burns, at least according to what I’ve read. (The Guardian seems to have the only sensible coverage on this.)

So the strike’s about the pension scheme. Ineos wants to close it to new employees and get the existing ones paying in to it. Even so it says

Ineos says it will keep a final salary scheme for all existing workers, paying one sixtieth salary for every year worked, and is proposing that employees contribute 6% over the next six years.

Anyhow, what this strike has shown the Grangemouth workers is that if you’re in the right industry, in the right place, in a key loction, you have to be listened to.

Who’s next? Water workers? Electricity? Gas? Docks? We get the underground strikes from time to time, but the Grangemouth case shows that some workers will realise that they can - at least - get their pensions improved, at the very least.

I’m sure the government’s COBRA group will already know which are the key parts of our infrastructure that need to be kept running. I wonder how easily that would leak to the staff involved there?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Ever sat next to the toilet on a long-haul flight? Maybe you wrote this letter then... (16 June 2005; score: 39.83%)
• Service Scrubber; and the man behind the Google-AOL deal (26 December 2005; score: 38.63%)
• London wins Olympics: and now interviewers start saying "Yes, but.." (6 July 2005; score: 32.98%)

And to think it all started with a little note by a barrister in Guardian Money. Richard Colbey, wherever he is (probably hiding from angry bankers), wrote a short piece that suggested that credit card charges didn’t conform to contract law. That was 2004.

Years on, we have this:

UK banks could be forced to return billions of pounds of overdraft fees to consumers after a high court judge said the fees could be challenged by the Office of Fair Trading.

The strange thing: somewhere along the line, people stopped worrying about credit cards and focussed on banks. I don’t know quite where.

Mr Justice Andrew Smith agreed with the OFT that charges were covered under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulation 1999.

This paves the way for a further hearing in which the court will decide whether the charges are unfair and, if so, what a fair charge should be.

According to the OFT, banks receive up to £3.5bn a year in unauthorised overdraft fees - nearly £10m a day.

They charge up to £39 for a bounced cheque, standing order or direct debit, and critics of the system say this does not reflect the actual cost incurred by the banks, which could be as little as £2.

The ruling followed a test case in January between the OFT and eight banks and building societies.

I think it could be a while before we see banks pass on interest rate drops. Just a.. feeling I’ve got.

The intriguing thing is that the OFT hasn’t done this with credit card companies - are they next?.

But the bad news, BT customers, is that the earlier case against it failed. BT seems to have law on its side:

at Walsall County Court, District Judge Michael Ellery ruled the customers had been given proper notice of the charge, that it was fair and was a core term of BT’s contract. It is the fifth time BT has won a county court case over the charge.

This doesn’t stop it feeling wrong, very wrong, since there’s no processing involved in internet banking, for example. Paging Richard Colbey..

Update: as suggested by Mark in the comments, they’re only maybe illegal. So I changed the headline.

Update: in comments which got spam-trapped and then deleted, “Jojo” added:

The OFT have already done this with credit card companies - 2 years ago. Default charges were restricted to £12 (anything over that was to be automatically considered unfair and therefore illegal), though some people think this is still too high, especially as the actual cost to the companies is probably closer to £2 than £12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4878798.stm

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• BBC Money Programme gets on the "banks can't impose penalty charges" bus: welcome aboard! (13 December 2006; score: 113.21%)
• When even the head of the Financial Services Authority doesn't understand contract law... (1 April 2006; score: 101.11%)
• "Late payment charges" on credit cards: you don't have to pay, and I'm the living proof (2 March 2005; score: 87.46%)

I haven’t written much about child3 and his cochlear implant because, well, things are going so well in general. His speech improves all the time (”I don’t want it!” is his favourite new phrase), his listening skills get better (he can hear us saying things, or the sound of the front door, in a room where we have the Today programme with its babble of voices on in the background), all is rosy.

Then you come across this:

The FDA announced that the implants “pose a public health risk due to excessive moisture, exposing patients to the risk of device failure, possible surgery, and the potential for additional hearing loss.” “Advanced Bionics shipped [cochlear implants] in violation of the law between January 2005 and July 2006.”

The reason: a supplier, Astro Seal, provided components that once incorporated didn’t keep the implants waterproof. Now, if moisture gets into the implant (inside your head, above your ear) then when you attach the external processor - which powers it via FM waves which also carry the signal - then the wearer, besides not getting any hearing, gets unpleasant electric shocks.

The backstory: the FDA had told Advanced Bionics to stop shipping implants with these parts in 2003. Yet somehow they hung around in the system. And child3 was implanted in May 2006. Did that mean he might have one of the potentially faulty implants, which AB itself said had a fail rate of 20% within 3 years?

Note that the FDA/AB recall isn’t for implants already, um, implanted -

In March 2006 Advanced Bionics recalled all unimplanted HiResolution 90K cochlear implants containing the Astro Seal component because some of the devices were not water proof and were failing at an unacceptable rate. Mrs. Rappaport’s device [she’s the one suing for damages in the link], unfortunately, had already been implanted by the time of the recall. [Hers failed.]

The FDA estimates that 3,477 of the devices with the Astro Seal component had already been implanted at the time of the 2006 recall. Of those an estimated 1,502 devices were implanted in children under 18 years old.

It wasn’t good finding this on a Sunday evening. Everything’s going swimmingly. But this brought on visions: it stops working, and then we have to go with the nuclear option - explantation. (Implant = put in, explant = take out.) That is, taking the old one out, and putting a new one in. Probably in the same ear. (Would you, though? Or would you implant in the other ear?) That would mean some period during which you’d realise it wasn’t working. And then you’d have the explantation operation, and then at least six weeks for it to heal, and then you’d have to start all over again on the process of “tuning” - getting the brain to start realising what it’s hearing via the implant. OK, young brains have amazing plasticity (their ability to adapt to new inputs) but this feels like a step too far. And that delay, in the time when he should be learning more speech, words, perhaps even written language. Even implanting the other ear some time ahead, if you knew you were going to explant

It’s at this point that you wonder quite what you’ve done to your child. Is that his salvation in his head? Or a ticking time bomb? We’d never had any doubts about the benefits of cochlear implants, but for me this was the most uncomfortable moment of all. The Damoclean sword hanging there: is that seal waterproof? Will it hold?

So being able to check on the next day and confirm that child3’s is not one of the affected implants was the best possible news. Weights lifted, all that sort of thing. But it’s also a reminder that technology isn’t perfect. Hell, nothing is. And the choices we make are all fallible; all we can hope is that they’re the best for the longest possible periods of time.

Update: Advanced Bionics has got in touch to point out that it manufactures in the US - which means the FDA is right on its doorstep, and on its case, with visits every couple of months to the manufacturing. That’s different from other CI makers, based outside the US; while they still have to get FDA approval for work in the US, there’s not the same in-depth inspection. Plus, they don’t get fined for errors.

There’s probably something to be written about how one would hold CI makers to consistent standards: what do you count as an “event” that needs to be reported to the national devices agency? But that’s outside my purview. I’m just relieved, is all.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• My own call for papers - on cochlear implants (8 May 2006; score: 92.89%)
• I might watch through my fingers: cochlear implants live on the Net! (6 July 2007; score: 88.01%)
• Better cochlear implants; the power law of homelessness and pollution (13 February 2006; score: 73.9%)

The scary thing about the following is that it’s now an underestimate. So, start reading:

Imagine that we live in a world in which, owing to genetic mutation, income translates directly into height. The richer you are, the taller you are. Then imagine that the entire population of Britain marches past you, in the course of an hour, ranked in order of their income. What sort of procession would you see?

After three minutes the walkers would be 2ft tall. After a quarter of a hour they would still be dwarfs, of about 3ft; they would reach 4ft after 24 minutes. You would have to wait until 37 minutes before a person of average height, about 5ft 8in, walked by. In the final quarter of an hour, abnormally large people, more than 7ft in height, would start appearing.

With three minutes left, people of twice average height would be passing by. In the final minute, the figures would be giants 30 yards high. Yet even they would not be the biggest. In the hour’s closing seconds, a small number of super-earners would walk past: each would be earning pounds 1m a year or more - and thus each would be at least 235 yards tall. These freakish beings - top barristers, leading City analysts, a few chief executives as well as stars in the entertainment industries - are the products of a society that is increasingly organised in a new, freakish way.

This comes from “How fat cats rock the boat“, by Charles Leadbeater - when he was deputy editor at The Independent. Guess when it was written?

November, 1996. Since then, income inequality has got worse.

It’s one of the most insightful pieces I’ve ever read on how celebrity culture feeds on itself:

In theory competition should make it more difficult for a small elite to charge excessively high prices and make monopoly profits. Yet in fact more competition helps such elites. In highly competitive markets there is a premium on perceived value - on standing out from the competition by looking distinctive; after price, the biggest influence on consumer choice is brand. So those people and companies that are particularly good at marketing, advertising and self- promotion will tend to do better, everything else being equal. Success will breed success, celebrity will beget celebrity.

Thus, in television a handful of comedians have cornered the market in light entertainment, becoming a self-perpetuating elite. And, of course, celebrities like to deal with other celebrities; that is a symbol of their status.

If you are a film celebrity, you want your divorce handled by a celebrity divorce barrister, your hair done by a celebrity cutter, your home decorated by a celebrity designer and so on. As well as being more competitive, however, markets for many goods, whether they are computer games, books, films or legal services, are becoming more international. And larger markets mean larger rewards for the people who win. Being a winner in a purely local market - a school sports day - might bring you a small cup; winning in a global market - the Olympics - brings you vast rewards.

Remember, this was all before the rise of magazines like Heat. But it shows why they rose: because we focus on those at “the top” or near it, and that attention begets more attention. But it also has dramatic effects on income inequality.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The %! curse of overusing percentages (21 August 2006; score: 30.47%)
• At the Guardian: the Tech Weekly podcast (13 February 2008; score: 25.51%)
• Bush vs Kerry in 100 words as seen by Microsoft Summarizer (20 October 2004; score: 25.34%)

Over at ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (which sounds like a wonderful Terry Thomas-style name; one imagines he waxes his goatee and chuckles) picked up my post from the Guardian Tech blog about the mysteriously wandering Psystar. You know, basically doing a little bit of journalism, rather than repeating what had been on Every Other Mac Site.

Down in the comments one then finds someone remarking

Isn’t it interesting that it is some blogger that actually engages in true investigative journalism. The big news houses like ZDNet, ComputerWorld, etc. simply re-printed press releases.

Methinks the small mammals are going to outlive the aging, soon to be extinct dinosaurs.

To which obviously wants to respond, saying “Uh, yeah, that would be one of us small mammal big media journalist types. The word ‘blog’ not being exclusive to people sitting in their front room.”

But ZDNet insists that you must register before you can comment. Well, fair enough - so does the Guardian. After giving your name, rank, serial number and grandmother’s maiden name, it sends an email which has a URL that you click to confirm you’re not a bot. Fair enough.

Until you get the email. It’s been written by a prehistoric - or possibly post-historic - emailer, which uses high-bit ASCII, and these get mangled when they come through your average mail server. So I get a message that looks literaly like this:

Thank you for registering with ZDNet. To fully activate your free membershi=
p and gain unlimited access to all of ZDNet=92s business technology content=
, simply click this link:

http://membership.zdnet.com/1318-1_24-44.html?e=3Dc0vme%2F4pHESbnmCnr7Zun1x=
NtXT6%2Bei8Rp%2FoldU1JY%2BBEo%2F0Wzxazf9%2FcZB%2Bxht7C9C%2BhcSgLIbJfk6rDee8=
ht2mqhTyzu9x

Note: This final registration step is a security measure that=92s designed =
to protect you. Clicking the link above confirms your e-mail address and he=
lps ensure the authenticity of your registration. (If you experience proble=
ms with our link, just copy and paste the entire URL into your browser=92s =
address field and press Enter.)

(I’ve changed one of the characters in that field, so you can’t log in as me.) I’ve tried everything, or what feels like everything: removing the line breaks only, removing the = signs apart from the first one, replacing %2F and %2B with their ASCII equivalents. Nothing works. But then looking at how the email is mangled - in a way that I’ve not seen with anything for absolutely *ages* - it’s clear that there might be any sort of gummidging in there.

So I thought I’d try to contact the help centre, as it offers when you put a “bad” URL in. There’s a link there saying “Contact Customer Support for more information” and it says it links to http://cma.zdnet.com/texis/members/zdnetcontact.html. Except every time I tried it, I was through the rabbit hole, and back at the front page. Uh?

ZDNet got rid of some people recently and I’m sure it’s been having hassles - financial? - though I’m damned if I can find any trace of it now. I wonder if the impossibility of commenting/registering is anything to do with it?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Oh yeah? Survey this! (27 August 2004; score: 83.94%)
• The mystery of my non-existent invitation to meet Steve Ballmer.. and other PR triumphs (6 October 2004; score: 53.45%)
• How are would-be spammers registering on my Wordpress blog if I've disabled registering? (15 February 2007; score: 52.68%)

So grateful to the fine burbia for this tale of how they moved house and found they have a new contractor. You’ll recall (of course) how in series 5 (I think) of The Sopranos the issue of who got to mow whose lawns and cut whose trees was the subject of a bitter turf war between Pauli Walnuts and a recently-released Wise Guy; curb-stomped arms (breaks them thoroughly, y’see) were involved, as was thumping people holding the rope for guys up in trees who then fell to earth.

What, you thought that was made up? Wake up to how The gardener made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, which tells of how one morning the bell was rung by

a small man, as dessicated as a piece of beef jerky and about as thin, stood on the step, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. His eyes were like stainless steel, his skin was the color of tobacco. He wore a soiled cap and blackened pigskin gloves, holding the burnished handle of a heavy rake in one hand.

Uh, yeah? What could it be?

“Mister,” he said slowly. “I’m the gardener.”

He looked up and down the quiet street. “I mow this lawn,” he said. “I mow that lawn. And the lawn across the street. Mrs. Tagliali on the corner, I mow her lawn. Mr. Schmetterer, I mowed his lawn, until he died.” I wondered what killed Mr. Schmetterer. Can coercive raking result in death?

“Uh, uh, um, what…” I replied, channelling my inner Daniel Webster. “I thought I’d, uh, do it myself, actually.”

The gardener swung the rake gently to and fro. “Do it yourself? That could be very hard work,” he said slowly. How does one recognize menacing behavior in gardeners? He continued with his pitch coldly. “I mow, and rake the leaves in the fall, and spread the fertilizer and the lime. This lawn, that lawn, across the street, up the block, everywhere around here. No do-it-yourself around here. Do-it-yourself could get you a heart attack.”

He fished into his shirt pocket and came up with another cigarette. Unfiltered. “Sometimes they try to do-it-themselves. Things happen. Lose an eye, a finger, who knows what could happen.” He gestured over to the fire-engine red mower at the garage door. “The blade can be very, very sharp.” He lit his cigarette and snuffed the match with his glove.

But read the whole thing - this isn’t the end - to get the full, look-over-your-shoulder feel.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• "It's over for the little guy" - Sopranos clip unearthed (27 February 2008; score: 44.79%)
• From the end of the Sopranos back to the beginning (30 October 2007; score: 34.16%)
• Harry Potter and the pointless reviews (fear not, no spoilers here) (21 July 2007; score: 28.04%)