James Avery’s blog

Well, mainly due to my own lack of planning, I have a couple of hours to spend here on some worn out keyboard in a corner internet cafe in Granada, before trying to get into Alhambra for an evening visit (all day tickets were sold out). For any pedants reading this, I am talking about Granada´s Alhambra fort ‘ yes, “the” Alhambra, except that this is technically a misnomer, as Alhambra means “The Red One”, and I´m not going to visit “The The Red One”. Anyway, I digress - what was I saying about needing to kill some time?

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia doesn´t have much to say on the matter. That great bastion of PC speak is probably quite happy with the concept of killing time, as so much of said activity is done on their own website! Well, at least you should learn something from each visit to Wikipedia, although if your name is Vernon Kay, then perhaps Wikipedia is one website you could do without!

A quick scan of Google for the phrase “killing time” (well, this is Spanish Google, so there might be better results in the UK) comes up with a hardcore band from New York, “Murder Consultants” (of the gaming variety, not hitmen - Dixon Jones of Receptional can sort anyone out in the UK looking for this kind of event in & around London), a Youtube spinoff and a book about Death Row in the USA.

No-one out there is giving much by way of definition or origin of the phrase (although according to Wikipedia, it has been used in the New York Times as far back as 1893), beyond the obvious. So in our 21st century society of re-branding and doublespeak, how should the phrase “killing time” be re-packaged to suggest a more productive use of such temporal luxuries?

Or would the PC brigade baulk at the suggestion that all time should be used constructively? After all, if exam failure in schools, sorry, learning communities, is now called “deferred success”, then sitting idle for a couple of hours is surely just “deferred activity”? Next time I´m sitting on the sofa watching another pointless squabble on Fox, I´ll think of that as my “deferred gym session” - but at least there are supposed to be a few feel good benefits from having a bit of a chuckle at some of the morons they get on that programme - everything in moderation as they say!

Well, that´s about 30 minutes so far of doing stuff which is mildly productive, and which has certainly managed to keep my attention going - so I certainly don´t think I need to go and turn myself in to the Time Police just yet! And if it means I´ve made my first non-political blog post in over 3 months, that can´t be too bad either.

But I´m still no closer to that definition. Answers on a PC please (that´s postcard, or comment sent from your Personal Computer - not reporting me to the Politically Correct Brigade or the local Police Constable).

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Time Management, Internet, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.