Auden's Sunday Best

Too long for a twitter post (c'mon, "tweet" is lame) and too not-interesting for a status update, this undernourished post has thus been dumped unceremoniously here. Also it's about poetry. Yeah.

I get to read W.H. Auden in a module next semester. I'm actually quite excited. You can thank Christopher Hitchens for that. Anywho, there's one poem of his that I particularly like, so here it is:

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum,

Bring out the coffin...let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle, moaning overhead,

Scribbling on the sky the message: He is Dead.

Put crepe bows 'round the necks of public doves,

Let traffic policemen wear black, cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East, my West.

My working week and my Sunday rest.

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,

I thought love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one.

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

Pour out the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good." 

Lovely, in't it? Because my reading skills are surprisingly iffy for someone that studies literature at university, I've always read the line in the third stanza as 'My working week and my Sunday best'. It was with dismay that I found out otherwise, not because I felt illiterate, but because I actually prefer my version. I prefer the contrast of the weekly toil - the drudgery, the mundanity - with getting suited and booted and being at one's best. 'Rest' feels apathetic in comparison, lacking in purpose and decisiveness. 'Sunday best' even maintains the religious imagery - doesn't that tradition stem from looking nice for church?

S'all today, folks.

Zooey Deschanel and Katy Perry: Not twins, alter-egos

Everyone's noticed how indie goddess Zooey Deschanel and pop-slut Katy Perry look alike.

It's like they're twins or something! 

However, Katy Perry is not Deschanel's long-lost sibling. No, instead Perry is her evil alter-ego. I think I'm onto something here. I'll break it down.

Appearance

Our pair of lovely lasses might look almost indistinguishable, but the key's in the details. Deschanel comes across as modest; Perry flaunts her modesty at every opportunity. What is mean by this is: boobs. We never really get to see any of Zooeys, but Katy Perry's approach to her boobs is best illustrated by a quote from Abraham Lincoln: 'you can show all your boobs some of the time, you can show some of your boobs all the time, but you can't show all your boobs all the time'. Perry's a slut; Deschanel's demure: 

"But I want to show all my boobs, all the time!" - Katy Perry

Relationships

They say people are judged by the company one keeps; one of our ladies socialises with esteemed gentlemen like Russell Brand and elegant ladies like Rebecca Black; the other hangs with scruffy oiks like that dodgy Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Can you guess which?

Hands off, you disreputable ruffian, you

The evil side clearly has a stronger pull on Ms. Perry than it does Ms. Deschanel. The latter goes for guys that you'd be happy take home to your mother; the former goes for guys who should be kept away from your mother at all costs, let he bangs her.

Music

A necessary part of being 'the perfect woman', which Zooey has apparently made her goal, is being able to sing and shit. She turned out to be annoyingly good at that too, when she released a fairly decent album of folky tunes, with, yes, a 'kooky' edge a few years ago. Then there's also the above clip which is slap-bang in line with her 'adorkable' persona. Katy Perry, as ever yang to Deschanel's yin, sings songs about pulling girls in fairly extensive detail. It's really classy and stuff. Zooey is the kind of girl that you can believe like The Smiths (because The Smiths are so indie, insouciant, and appeal to those with an outcast complex (all eighty billion of them) dontchaknow)

"Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers" - a real poet, that Morrissey

Conclusion

I think that's enough evidence to assert that Zooey Deschanel and Kety Perry, while facially eerily similar, diverge as far as possible when it comes to absolutely everything else. ZD is deliberately indie, KP literally makes 'pop'ular music; ZD looks like she'd side with the nerd at school; KP would be the bully. I may be clearly in favour of Deschanel here, but I'd bet Katy Perry would poll pretty strongly if they went up against each other in a popularity contest. 

Admission: This post is intended to be one that gets me hits. The previous and only other time I have written about a celebrity also happens to be my second most trafficked-post ever; what can I say, I guess people really like Megan Fox. Also, (500) Days of Summer was on telly tonight so there's that too. 

Some charities are 10 000 times more effective than others. It's worth knowing which.

The British public love to give to charity. From big BBC-led television extravaganzas like Children in Need, Sports Relief and Comic Relief to your everyday person raising money after the death of a relative, we as a nation seem to relish giving. It's an undervalued national character trait, if you ask me.

What we don't do, though, when deciding to donate to third-world-relief charities, is to take time to consider which charities have the best cost to result ratio. It's the big names charities that take in the majority of our dough, the charities with a broad scope. That's not a slight: it's difficult and tedious to do because there are so many charities seeking to make a difference. It's a shame there is less awareness of the differing potential for change across charities because it makes a massive difference. According to the excellent givingwhatwecan.org "it is not even a matter of some charities being 10 or 100 times as effective: even restricted to the field of health programs in developing countries, research shows that some are up to 10,000 times as effective as others." Damn. So what they're saying is that for every live you improve giving to a less effective charity you could be improving ten thousand lives. 


Giving What We Can is an organisation in which all members have taken a pledge to give 10% of their earnings  to the most efficient charities. It sort of feels like a group of super-philanthropists with a dauntingly noble dedication to making a difference. However, if you're put off by the scarily large 10% figure, like I have been, they also speak an enormous amount of sense on giving efficiently and effectively. Even if you just give what you feel comfortable with, knowing which charities do the best work will enhance the value of the sum many times. If I were to go further on the best charities and so on I would just be quoting the website, so for convenience have a big juicy link instead.