Bar or Pub?

What is the difference between a bar and a pub?

Silly question. There are maybe as many answers as there are people asked this question.

I only want to give my own definition and you can make of it what you will.

I have noticed two distinct situations. In the one case, you have a group of two or more people who are going to go out somewhere for the evening. Maybe for a meal, maybe for a few drinks, maybe for a walk. In this situation, the social group is the given and it is that group that chooses a place or places to be together and enjoy their evening or afternoon together.

On the other hand, you have the situation where an individual goes out to a specific place. This may be the train spotters club or the knitting circle and so on. In this case, the social group is at that particular venue.

So when it comes to an evening where alcohol is involved, you have the same two situations - a social group that goes to one or more venues, taking the social group to each place. The social group is primary. The other situation is where a person goes to a particular place for the social group they will find there and has a few drinks while engaging in that social group.

The place for the first situation is what I call a bar. The place for the second is what I call a pub. It just hinges on whether the social group is formed before the outing or already exists at the venue.

The existing social group in a pub, as I define it, is made up of people that the publican and others would refer to as "the regulars". In such a place, I have heard the people who come in as an already existing social group for a couple of drinks before moving on referred to as the "randoms".

Of course, a bar does not have regulars as such and caters specifically for the social group custom. A bar is more likely to have happy hour and 2-for-1 specials to woo the nomadic drinking groups.

A pub does not have to do much at all. It has its regulars, some of whom will be there most days, summer or winter, rain or shine, money in the till as regular as clockwork - ker-ching.

Another way of looking at it is one the one hand you have people who get in a group and go out to drink. On the other you have people who go to meet and talk with mates and have drinks as part of that process. The primary purpose is different.

The first group consists of people who are more likely to "do shost" and end up marauding the streets on a friday night, bereft of speech and only communicating in neo-simian whoops and calls. The second group consists of people who do not intend to get drunk, put away a fair few of their regular tipple and bid a polite goodnight to all, making their way home alone and unstripped of the power of speech.

But these are only my own observations across 6 countries and 20 years.

Monday Morning, Clean Desk

I worked with a fellah who put me on to this. So I am promoting his idea, not my own. But I loved it.

There are all these people in positions of power who specialise in saying "no". There is something the people like to do. There are people who for whatever reason not only dislike doing that thing but also wish to stop others doing it too.

So, say there is a particular campaign driven by the "no brigade". If they are successful in stamping out that thing that irks them, they will come into work on monday morning and find an empty desk. Job done. No more work. Out of work.

That doesn't happen. They won't let it. They already have a new thing up their collective sleeves to wheel into place. After all, they are the "no" experts, so they can do all that is required to remove anything from the playing field. Publish partial and selected facts to create a character arc in the population, to get them on-side. And away we go again.

So don't yield to the peer pressure they have created and heavy me to stop doing whatever the current target is. Next year, they will be doing the same with something you like doing. Word.

And that was my mate's contribution.

Oh - I said "partial" back there. Here's some information for you.

In New Zealand, the annual excise on tobacco product sales is $1b. The annual healthcare cost for smoking related problems is $300m. This leaves a massive $700m going into consolidated revenue to benefit all.

Published information (propaganda, n. Government adverts) gives only the health care cost to persuade the mob that smokers are costing them money.

So all the smokers stop tomorrow. Healthcare costs for smokers will not immediately stop. The government is down $1b per year. Who is going to make good the shortfall of at least, at least the $700m balance?

Everyone is. Which is fine for the ex-smokers because they end up paying less net than they did. But are you non-smokers who pressure and criticise and marginalise smokers, are you ready to put you hand in your pocket and pay for us all to stop without harming the country's economy.

Then there are the little shops that will lose business.

Then there is a good excuse for the government to introduce cut-backs in health services - despite the fact the ex-smoker care need would not stop overnight and has already been more than paid for by the potential users.

And don't even get me started on the idea that smokers and drinkers should go further down the queue for health care!

Don't accept what you are told - even by me. Check it out, expand it, get the whole drum of oil before you decide how you are going to behave towards others.

The Politics of Addiction

You can like or enjoy lots of things. You can can also be addicted to almost anything.

The difference between really enjoying something and being addicted to something is the answer to the question: "Do I sometimes, or even often, neglect my day-to-day responsibilities - be they self-appointed or thrust upon me - to engage instead in this thing that I like."

Basically that and that alone.

Some of the people who drink are addicted to drinking alcohol. Some are not. Some who smoke are addicted to smoking. Some are not.

Your specialists in various fields can come out with all sorts of qualifications about "addiction" - alcohol addiction, nicotine addiction and so on. Any dependency on a substance is secondary to the addiction. For example, you can be addicted to watching TV, gambling, work.

And as for "substance abuse" - what a dodgy expression. It has the same structure as the expressions "child abuse" with an entirely different intent. Hello substance. Are you abused? No. I am being used in exactly the way I was designed to be and for my intended purpose. I think "self abuse by substances" might be better, but clumsy.

You use language to think with. To the extent that your constructions are inadequate or inappropriate representations of reality, so will your thinking processes and conclusions reached be equally suspect. Listen to the language used and it will be a good indication as to whether you are going to put any faith in the speaker's conclusions and subsequent advice.

And then, to make things even clearer (to me) or befuddle those I have just mentioned, the "addiction gene" has been isolated and identified.

I have seen expert opinion reported as stating that it is fine to target smokers, because they can choose otherwise.

Well, yes. They can give up fairly easily if they are "merely" enjoying what they are doing. If they are addicted, they can switch to a different target for their addiction.

Fair enough.

But if they are addicted and if they do (therefore?) possess the addiction gene in their makeup and if they do switch their addiction, who's to say whether that target too will be now or later subjected to the same restrictions, media-generated peer pressure, carefully edited facts, etc that smoking is at the moment.

So yes. It is not like skin colour as such. You can switch your target of addiction. But you remain addicted.

And for those people, restrictions placed on the target(s) of their addiction are restrictions that have a genetic base.

I thought in our PC world we did not discriminate on genetic grounds.

A congenital addict, outside in the rain and wind of winter having a smoke or a person with one colour of skin sitting in the back of the bus.

Be honest, and admit the agenda all ye who sit in judgement backed by laws.

Filler Cap

Time for petrol.

Oh-oh - I'm not in my own car. Which side is the filler cap.

The same side as the windscreen wiper stalk on the steering column.

Easy.

Music, culture and enforced immigration

I was talking to a girl in Wellington who said that Christchurch was musically uninteresting because she and her friends could not find any live hip-hop music there.

And my mind drifted off as usual. I was thinking about music genres and their origins and how many people take a liking to music that is not of their culture. Why not? Hey, I like celtic music and I am not celtic, although I do have Welsh and Scottish ancestors, so I suppose that could be a factor.

And in a flight of fancy I thought about people, forcibly taken from their own country and put to work in a far away land. I thought of the music they brought with them and the way they kept their own cultural origins alive with song and story. And I thought of how in the "host" country, their music became a major influence of that country's musical traditions. And how the music from that host nation finds its way all over the world. It has its own style and is easily recognisable as regards its origin to all who have a reasonable ear.

Of course, I am talking about Australia and the transportation of people having in the main irish or cockney ancestry from their homes into a foreign and hostile land, where they worked hard in captivity until they died or were eventually freed.

And so the irish ballads are not only alive and well in the old songs of Australia but their influence lives on in latter day song-writers and performers. So what problem is there if others can relate to those songs and the culture that gave them birth?

Which brings me to the USA. Did you think earlier that was the country I was going to talk about. Same difference as far as I can see. People taken from their home country, made to work, died or were freed, developed their own songs and stories based on their own culture, that genre being developed and becoming mainstream in the host country, that music listened to all over the world regardless of cultural difference.

Seems the same to me.

Anecdotal Evidence

To a friend: You and I were discussing many things in the Wellington Chinese restaurant as I sipped on a Tsing-Tao waiting for my take-away. And yes, you did indeed anticipate everything I was going to say. And yes indeed to you it would have been anecdotal.

But I now realise what was irking me about that classification. I had, as the General Semanticists would say, confused orders of abstraction.

I have heard that in some Buddhist sects, acolytes are encouraged to say either ‘I know ...” or “I have heard ...”. Let me call the passing on of something that I know directly from my experience a 0-order anecdote. It is not anecdotal to me but it will be to you. And let me call something I have heard about or read about a n-order anecdote. That would be anecdotal to both of us. It was this 0-orderness that made it uncomfortable for me to accept your “anecdotal” tag.

So you may well have heard the things I was going to say before from others. But in my case they would have been 0-order. I suspect that where you had heard those same things before from others they were often if not always n-order. Or perhaps I am taking bets on myself.

Either way, it is the difference between being told a current situational joke face-to-face by Billy Connolly or Eddie Izzard and being told a joke by a bloke in a pub who heard it from a mate who got it from a stand-up routine. It is still funny if you have not heard it before. But the one is 0-order and the other is n-order and they are different.

Here is a 0-order joke: A Palestinian, an Arab and an Israeli walked into the pub. They looked at each other and said “We must be in the wrong joke”. 0-order albeit derivative.

So thank you, my friend, for helping me to sort this out.

And, perhaps you might like to consider whether there is a different “weight” you can apply to what people say, depending on the order of the anecdotal offering. Just ask them if it is anecdotal to them.

And perhaps I can be a bit more rigorous in saying “I know that ...” and “I have heard/read that ...” as appropriate, providing I am not cut off before speaking.

I think that I could rarely be / in a talk as helpful as with Tree. (Apologies to Joyce Kilmer). 

Is TWOCing* looting?

From the western edge of the cordon around the city formerly known as Christchurch you can look across the river at “The Strip” where all the bar-restaurants stand with their doors still wide open from hasty escapes. No one is allowed into the cordon area but we saw members of the army reserves sitting outside the cordon to maintain order and compliance. This is good.

The only problem is – they are sitting on seats under umbrellas that used to be outside those bars and restaurants.

Aw, you might say, they are doing a good job under difficult conditions. Give them a break.

So where is the line in the sand? At the end of a shift, if they feel like de-stressing with a drink, should they go over and grab a bottle of whiskey? If they need to get somewhere quickly, is it OK to take an abandoned car?

It is these people that I and others are relying on to ensure that there is no danger to persons and no looting of effects.

I have been unable to get to my apartment since the ‘quake’. And yes, like everyone else, I can walk away from 95% or so of what is in there. But everyone has that odd 5% of stuff that can never be replaced. Some of course is of sentimental value. There are some things, hand-made jewellery, say, or collectables where those items may be the only ones in the world.

Fortunately, any looters – and rest assured there have been some getting in and out – would probably only value the things that I do not.

So I guess there is a difference between looting and TWOCing. The looters keep quiet about what they have done.

Quis custodiet custodies?

* TWOC is the delightful UK expression for ‘taking without consent’.

Text vs Voice

Three business reasons for using electronic mail instead of the phone:

• ·         The person you are contacting does not have to be available for you to start the communication process. At the time you communicate, you do not know if you are interrupting the other person in some important activity.
  
• ·         When the other person constructs a reply you have their full attention and they have all relevant facts, documents etc to hand.
  
• ·         There is a ‘hard’ copy of all that transpires. It is easy to file, document, forward etc the responses and/or attachments.

I learned this in 1986 and have rarely used a phone since for business or personal. (We DID have established world-wide connectivity in business before the internet you know. Dur).

And hooray when I got onto SMS in 1999. You won’t find me walking along the street or outside a pub, restaurant, someone’s house, yelling into a mobile phone.